[mdlug] Obahma plan to digitize health care

[Jonathan Billings]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 09:04:09AM -0800, Michael S. Mikowski wrote:
> If this is going to happen, letting this fall into the hands of the 
> establishment with closed solutions would be a serious misstep IMO.
> I for one will be exploring opportunities to become part of this
> effort using OSS.   

I know that there is a lot of contract work building information
systems for hospitals, I've heard some stories from collegues who have
gone in to fix already built "systems" that were incredibly poor
implementations, to the point where they were so afraid of touching
the systems because the sloppy security.

Perhaps a good place to start would be to provide an established open
source system that's proven to be secure, one that properly follows
all the medical information guidelines.  Right now, you either have
something that's cheap or something that's compliant, and usually
neither. 

I doubt it'll happen though, because the IT companies are making so
much money off the broken healthcare system.  Would a federal program
produce something that would work?  I have my doubts.  I am happy to
see that the incoming administration has lofty goals that are
forward-thinking, even if I can't comprehend how they'd accomplish
it. 

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>