Healthcare Must Open Its Eyes To Open Source

Recently I attended a product demonstration at my local Apple store where we were presented with an iPad-based EHR solution. There were lots of oohs and aahs as the demonstrator did a fictional patient visit, recorded the symptoms and automatically generated a bill (with appropriate ICD-9 or 10 codes – you pick!). I want to write more about the vendor, HealthFusion in a later post, so I'm not going to go too much in to what I saw there and how the company is doing some impressive work.

Here is what struck me: The app was great. Doctors and CIOs in the audience were practically salivating over goodies such as the ability to take a picture and amend it to a patient's file or the way the program provided options to quickly build a patient report. However, the cynic in me could only think that as great as a web-based app is, we've been building things with these capabilities in other markets for years. What impressed me more is that the app in question supports HL7 [...].