Today I read an article about Misys leading healthcare into open source. I guess I can mostly agree with the idea of them leading into open source, but even Misys is taking baby steps into the open source realm. The article says that it’s going to “open source components of its proprietary Connect Healthcare solution”[emphasis added]. So, I don’t want to completely knock Misys for only making some components open source, but if we’re going to call them a leader in healthcare’s movement to open source then it needs to be more than just components. I think the real leader was VistaEMR (I think that’s it’s official name) was open sourced. Granted, I don’t think they had much choice, but that’s being a leader.
One thing that does look good for Misys is they have “hired Ryan Bloom, a founder of the Apache Portable Runtime project and a major contributor to the Apache HTTP 2.0 project.” I don’t know any specifics about Ryan Bloom, but I can tell you that the Apache open source project is a great one that I believe will power most of the web in the future.
This will be really interesting to watch as it evolves. Open source is now a pretty proven model in other software categories. Will it work for healthcare?
There is quite a bit of open source medical software available. Holger’s very good list caught my eye last month (here).
An open source business model is a rough road. Even if Misys can grow an active development community to provide additional functionality, increasing revenue from it will still be a real challenge. This will be especially true in a regulated environment, which is a barrier that other industries don’t have.
Thanks for the list of Open Source medical software. That is definitely a nice list. I’ll be blogging about the list soon.
We will let the market decide who is a leader and who isn’t but relative to the fact that Misys is adding “components”, it should be understood that we have every intention of continuing to make Connect product contributions but will only do so if the code is relevant and is supportable by the company. We don’t want to be acused of ‘dumping and running’ as we are committed to the open source space. On Bob’s reference to business models, it’s not just about revenues. Shared development on common problems is just smart business as you amortize the cost. At Misys, we don’t expect to differentiate ourselves on our integration products/solutions; we want to sell EMRs and complex integration is a barrier to adoption. At HIMSS we were able to demonstrate, using open source projects, how integration may be implemented quicker and less expensively using an IHE infrastructure. If anyone is interested in joining our mailing list, check out our Braid Project at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/Braid. Other details about why/how we are doing this can be found on our original Q&A: http://www.misyshealthcare.com/Products/Product+Portfolio/Misys+Connect/Open+Source.htm