Medsphere

Open source, not $19 billion, may be best health care stimulus

The federal economic stimulus package provides $19 billion to upgrade the U.S. health care system to digital records. It's a nice gesture, but the U.S. federal government has already developed a robust medical ERP system that could significantly improve U.S. health care. It's called VistA. It's open source.

It's already paid for.

VistA was developed by the U.S. Veterans Administration and the medical professionals involved in its extensive hospital network. Read: doctors developing software for other doctors.

This bottom-up development effort appears to be working: the VA hospital system consistently delivers superior … Read more

Picturing open source vs. proprietary software

I loved this picture that Medsphere sent me today. It shows the Medsphere "Catch the open source wave" van next to the Cerner semi truck at HIMSS 2009, a health care IT conference in Chicago.

Is this a sign of how much open source differs from proprietary software, or an indication of just how far we have to go before we can have "semis" of our own?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The critical need for open-source health care

One of President Obama's biggest presidential ambitions is to reform the U.S. health care system. With more than $2 trillion spent each year on health care costs, an estimated 25 to 30 percent of which is administrative waste, one of the best stimuli to the U.S. economy could be to fix our broken health care system.

It's unclear, however, whether the Obama administration plans to tackle one of the root causes of U.S. health care inefficiency: closed, siloed, and payer-centric data.

Talking with a neighbor the other day who specializes in health care IT, he … Read more

Open source for the medical field: A comprehensive list

My father is a doctor, and isn't known for his technical prowess, so perhaps this list of 100 open-source projects geared toward medical professionals won't help him. Think of all the money you could save, Dad!

Actually, this sort of software will never appeal to people like my father, but he's not the one who buys software for his clinic, anyway. It's the system integrator specializing in the medical field who need this software, and who can make great margin gains by pushing open-source medical software like MedSphere to hospitals, clinics, etc.

The Medsphere legal turmoil is now officially over

In a GREAT piece of news this morning, the Medsphere board has resolved all legal disputes with Steve and Scott Shreeve, the founders of Medsphere. According to Medsphere's PR team:

Medsphere Systems Corporation today announced that all legal disputes involving the company and Steve and Scott Shreeve have been settled and resolved by mutual agreement of the parties.… Read more

Medsphere, Keane team to help hospital

Medsphere is off to a roaring start with its new CEO, signing Century City Doctors Hospital (CCDH) in Los Angeles in a major deal that sees $1.2 million going to Keane Consulting for the implementation and a sizable (but unannounced) sum going to Medsphere.

Few know this about Medsphere, but its deals can stretch into seven-figure deals, but it can also scale down to meet tight budgets. Perhaps small change by traditional ERP standards, where the bill can run past $100 million, but that's the point. Medsphere makes high-end Vista easy enough to use that even smaller hospitals can tap into its advantages. Kudos to the Shreeve brothers for recognizing the value Vista could bring while they slogged through medical school.

CCDH is certainly grateful:… Read more

Medsphere looks forward with new CEO, must also look back to fix past

Medsphere has been quiet for some time, yet it has always been one of the most interesting open-source stories in the market (both for good and bad reasons, though predominately good, at least prospectively). On the negative side, the company has chewed through management and has had a year-old corporate governance lawsuit dragging it down.

In a sign that the company is finally moving forward, Medsphere announced today that it has brought in a new CEO, Michael J. Doyle. Doyle brings over 20 years of experience in the healthcare/IT industry, most recently as president and CEO of Advantedge Healthcare Solutions, a New York-based software as a service (SaaS) outsourced physician-billing company. I'm guessing he's the sort of guy who would have gotten along well the the Shreeves, the brothers who founded the company.

He's saying the right things, at least, emphasizing open source (which is something the company has not done to the extent that it should, oddly enough):… Read more

Who will Oracle buy?

Larry Dignan over at ZDNet has an interesting, though speculative (though perhaps interesting because it's speculative? :-) post on Oracle's acquisition strategy. Since Oracle is not planning to slow its frenetic pace of acquisitions any time soon, Peter Goldmacher of Cowen & Co. asks, "Who would Larry buy?"

The list is interesting. I have a few alternative suggestions to Goldmacher's, to help Oracle get more involved in open source:… Read more