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Last week, iHealthBeat posted an 8 minute audio interview discussing the recently announced Open Health Tools consortium. Open source and healthcare has the potential to change the current healthcare IT landscape, enabling healthcare IT vendors to focus on what truly differentiates systems instead of forcing them to invest in developing basic infrastructure. Collaboratively, OHT will focus on developing free, open source healthcare IT infrastructure for use by anyone.
LinuxInsider recently published a case study on Florida Hospital and how they’ve used open source software to address challenges around reliability and cost. For more details, read the Red Hat case study of Florida Hospital or visit us online.
Red Hat is pleased to announce that we’re joining the Open Health Tools (OHT) open source community. OHT is working closely with a broad spectrum of healthcare groups, including: major national healthcare providers in areas such as Canada, Australia and the UK; healthcare standards groups like IHTSDO and HL7; healthcare policy groups such as HSSP; and software providers such as Red Hat. OHT’s ultimate goal is to collaboratively build software tooling that will enable the seamless electronic exchange of healthcare data. This is an ambitious goal, but with incremental steps, we think it can be achieved.
The first OHT project is the HL7 tooling project, which will take some of today’s HL7 tooling to the next level.
We are tremendously excited about the potential enhancements that open source can provide to the healthcare industry. Semantic interoperability is a huge challenge, and we believe the only way that we can achieve this goal is through a collaborative, open source development model that brings together all stakeholders.
Health IT has tremendous potential in addressing the major challenges we face in healthcare: improving patient safety and quality of care and managing costs while improving efficiency.
One of the most visible challenges that health IT faces is the question of protecting privacy. If patient privacy cannot be protected, patients will not trust a system with accurate, complete medical information, rendering the system useless.
Properly designed, greater adoption of health IT offers the potential to improve patient privacy. For example, electronic records enable patients to selectively give access to parts of their medical record to specific individuals. Electronic records can also audit access to medical records. Neither of these are practical with paper records.
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Florida Hospital is a huge hospital, with 2,300 beds spread across seven facilities. The Hospital is also highly regarded for the quality of care it provides, having secured accolades from publications such as US News and World Report.
The Florida Hospital IT team has embraced Red Hat solutions to provide a reliable infrastructure for patient information. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Global File System and Red Hat Cluster Suite, Florida Hospital has built a robust disaster recovery system that is designed to ensure continuous availability of patient data. The team at Florida Hospital runs a wide range of software on the Enterprise Linux servers, including Oracle, Caché, Quovadx and the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Learn more about the Florida Hospital environment in today’s press release and recently published case study.
The Red Hat healthcare team is back from a tremendously busy HIMSS08. Hundreds of customers stopped by our booth, many of whom were surprised to see us at HIMSS. We had a lot of positive feedback from our customers when we told them about our focus on healthcare, the tremendous adoption by ISVs and the growing momentum behind open source. One technology that generated a particular amount of interest was our MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform, which can present a single, real-time, read/write view of different data sources. Providers are looking to MetaMatrix to help address challenges around unifying scattered, distributed databases with different data models.
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The Red Hat healthcare team is at HIMSS08 in Orlando this week. We’re excited about our partnership with One Laptop Per Child, which will enable the donation of additional laptops and educational material to children in developing countries. Our partners AMD, DLT and Vivat have been working with us to tell our story in healthcare, and we’ve got a full slate of meetings lined up with current and prospective partners — the amount of interest from ISVs and customers in using Red Hat and open source for healthcare is clearly gaining momentum. If you’re at HIMSS, stop by our booth #4771 for a visit and even get your shoes shined.
John Halamka, the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), has aggressively adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux to reduce costs while improving system availability and reliability. Check out our interview with John and the case study on how BIDMC is using Red Hat solutions to help improve care for its patients.
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Recently, both ComputerWorld and InformationWeek discussed McKesson’s move from AIX and Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. McKesson has migrated 50 of its 70 applications to Red Hat, and plans to migrate the remainder within the next two years. As Michael Simpson, SVP/GM of Horizon Clinicals, observes, customers can save over 50 percent on their capital expense with this move, and they can reinvest these dollars into additional software that can protect patient safety such as McKesson’s Medication Safety Advantage software. This is perhaps the most compelling reason for healthcare providers and software vendors to consider providing Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a choice: cost savings on infrastructure can be reinvested in other initiatives that further improve the quality of care and patient safety.
See McKesson’s full Red Hat customer case study here.
Happy New Year! 2008 promises to be an exciting year for Red Hat and healthcare. One of our focuses has been on healthcare interoperability. Interoperability has many forms, and many different solutions are needed to address it in the healthcare industry. None of the solutions available today are perfect, but there are definitely advancements being made. Red Hat is actively working to improve healthcare interoperability in a number of different ways.
In December, Red Hat announced a partnership with HP in India on the MMEDD project, which will computerize 19 government hospitals and 14 medical colleges in Maharashtra. The first deployment will be at Sir JJ Hospital, one of the largest referral hospitals in the state. Red Hat is providing the infrastructure technology and expertise, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss.
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