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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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If you’re curious about what might be included in the next version of Fedora — Fedora 9 Sulphur, due out in late April 2008 — today’s Beta release gives a good glimpse into what’s ahead. The Beta release signals the feature freeze for the next release, meaning that all major features that we plan to include have to either be complete or in a testable state. It’s aimed at our developers and early adopters, but everyone in the community is given the opportunity to give feedback to improve our latest and greatest cycles. Testing of the Fedora 9 Beta release is really simple because with live media images, you don’t need to install anything.
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On Tuesday, March 11, Red Hat released the Beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. The Beta is expected to last approximately two months, with the final, supported update appearing soon after. During the Beta, Red Hat’s QA group, partners and customers will put the update through extensive testing for hardware support, feature enhancements and correct application operation to ensure that the final update is as solid as possible.
It is worth noting that although the Linux kernel is still 2.6-based, the number of enhancements between 2.6.0 and 2.6.24 (the latest version) are probably as extensive as between previous major releases, such as 2.2 to 2.4 or 2.4 to 2.6. This is because the 2.6 incremental development model is working very well, so that enhancements get merged upstream in manageable amounts. Who knows, perhaps the days of the “big new kernel release” are behind us, something that is a credit to the quality of the Linux kernel and the open source development model.
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As the March 29th voting deadline on OOXML approaches, Red Hat has announced its support of Open Document Format (ODF) instead of Office Open XML (OOXML). The Company released its official position statement on OOXML on Wednesday, March 5, 2008. The statement, hosted on Red Hat’s new Open Standards website, cites the desire for interoperability and the inadequacy of review as the Company’s primary reasons for opposing OOXML.
Red Hat supports ODF, an existing ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard, which was openly reviewed and developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for nearly three years before it was submitted to ISO for approval. In contrast, ECMA, the European Computer Manufacturer’s Association, reviewed OOXML for only one year before it sought ISO standardization. Despite the short review period, ECMA produced over 6,000 pages of documentation for OOXML, compared to the 700 pages of ODF.
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InfoWorld is presenting the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, CA from March 25-26, and we’re sending Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to keynote on true innovation in open source – see him speak from 9-9:30a.m. PT in the Gold Ballroom at The Palace Hotel. As a Platinum sponsor, Red Hat will also have have a tabletop booth in the exhibit area. Come hear how we’re changing the face of the open source industry.
We’re also sponsoring this year’s EclipseCon event in Santa Clara, CA from March 17-20. Join us at our booths to see demos of JBoss Developer Studio, or attend our session to hear more about the benefits of JBoss solutions. Find us in booths 216 and 217 at the ARAMARK Convention Center.
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I just reviewed David Carr’s article on the top 50 open source tools for CIOs to consider. It provides another perspective on how CIOs should view open source and how the environment for open source solutions is changing rapidly.
The economic challenges faced by most organizations reinforce the need to invest in value-oriented, highly functional open source products. Carr notes that you may also have an opportunity to better manage the open source tools that are already in your enterprise.
The selections reinforce the reality that whether you are considering Linux as an operating system, web services and application stacks, end user tools, wikis and content management systems, databases, programming tools or other applications, there are great open source solutions available. Read the full article at 50 Top Open Source Resources CIOs Should Know (And Maybe Love).
We’re using many of these open source solutions to run our business at Red Hat. We’ve found them to be both flexible and cost effective. They enable us to achieve our goal of driving innovation in Red Hat’s business.
For some thoughts on appropriate open source solutions for your personal applications, see my post on Migrating Your Personal Application Portfolio.
It’s no secret that Red Hat has a lot to offer customers, partners and the entire open source ecosystem. Red Hat has long been at the core of a multi-billion dollar (and growing) open source industry. We changed the dynamic of the technology industry and delivered tremendous value to thousands of customers in the process. But keep your eye on Red Hat, because this is just the beginning of our journey to build the defining technology company of the 21st century.
Linux Magazine recently recognized twenty companies in the free and open source software community that it thinks will have an impact on the market in the year to come. Red Hat was on the list, alongside Sun and Microsoft, and the usual suspects like Mozilla and Alfresco. To find the “movers and the shakers” included in the the article, Linux Magazine checked in with industry experts, polled on-line readers and mined their own observations of the open source industry in recent years.
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If you are a CIO, you may already be invested in open source applications at home. Or, like many, you may be a very busy person just using the applications that came with your personal computer, scanner, printer or camera and haven’t really considered the wealth of personal open source applications that are available and ready to use. If you fall in that second group, here are some candidates to get you started.