Updated at 1700: Almost missed the real story further down that the American Academy of Family Physician’s is considering open source. American Medical News has an article which may sound all too familiar. It is one Doctor’s saga with 3 different electronic medical record software, concluding that: “The most expensive was the worst and by far the cheapest was the best,” but it still didn’t work for her. It is a good read, if nothing else to note the money and time wasted, the arrogance of a closed-source vendor and the passing mentions of shoddy OS software: ‘”The problem with Dr. Orchard is that she was very computer illiterate,” said Richard Low, MD, Infor-Med’s CEO. Thousands of doctors are “highly satisfied” with his software because it helps them save time and work more efficiently; but to reap those benefits they had to learn to use the Praxis EMR software. “She refused to learn,” Dr. Low said…’ Thanks to Gary Kantor for this link.

Yahoo News is reporting on Merrill Lynch’s ‘top down’ efforts to deploy RedHat Linux in its organization: ‘…Merrill’s plans, and others like it, are very significant because they are the first companywide–rather than departmental–Linux implementations…”We are telling all of our vendors that they need to have some kind of Linux strategy,” says Carey, chief technology architect at Merrill. “We are hearing that consistently from everyone on Wall Street.”…one of the big benefits that Carey sees is that Merrill can write an application once and then deploy it with minimal work on mainframes, minicomputers, desktops, laptops and handhelds–whether it be on Intel (NasdaqNM:INTC – news) hardware or something else…’