This article has a great write-up on Midland Memorial Hospital’s use of Redhat Linux and Medsphere’s OpenVista�. Quoted from the article: “This year, Midland Memorial Hospital in Midland, Texas, became the first community hospital in the country to adopt Open Source-based electronic health records (EHR). The implementation reflects the emergence of Open Source alternatives in healthcare applications as well as the growing movement to computerize patient medical records to reduce costs and improve patient care.” Editor’s note: 10/19/06 The author of this Case Study is Medsphere’s Vice President of Sales and marketing. Read Dr. Ho’s comment about the article neglecting to mention that OpenVistA� is not Open Source.

After years of publicly saying they are an Open Source company, and the ‘leading provider of Open Source software for the healthcare industry’, Medsphere Corp. has yet to release their core product OpenVista� as Open Source. It is entirely their right to use the Veterans Affairs VistA codebase, modify, rewrite and not release it to the VistA community. However, holding forth as loudly and as publicly as they have that they are an Open Source company while not releasing their core software, makes me question the sincerity of their claim of being the ‘leading provider’ of Open Source. Especially in the face of suing the founders of the company for many millions of dollars because they actually released company developed software as open source on Sourceforge.

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