Open Source Study Included In US Stimulus Package 187
gclef writes "Buried deep in the details of the US stimulus package is an interesting provision that might go a long way toward helping Open Source software break into the medical area. It says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services should study the availability of open source health technology systems (PDF, page 488), compare their TCO against proprietary systems and report on what they find no later than Oct 1, 2010. Slashdotters may also be interested in the language that starts on page 553 of that PDF to see just what the final package says about broadband."
The stimulus plan was approved by the Senate on Friday and is expected to be signed by President Obama by Monday.
What open source health technology systems? (Score:1, Informative)
Seriously.
VistA on GT.M - Check it out... (Score:1, Informative)
The open source health management stack that runs on the open source GT.M, it is called VistA. It is used by many healthcare providers here in the US and Mexico.
Re:What and how (Score:2, Informative)
Re:what stimulus package? (Score:3, Informative)
$800 billion is ~$420 billion in 1982 dollars (using the GDP deflator; the other metrics give much smaller numbers). You have to account for inflation whenever you're talking about very large amounts of money since even a few years can make a 5-10% difference. Measuring Worth [measuringworth.com] has a good calculator.
Re:What open source health technology systems? (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_healthcare_software [wikipedia.org]
mind you, some of the research on open source I looked at considered openoffice a healthcare office suite.
Re:what stimulus package? (Score:1, Informative)
Umm, no. None of the Republicans voted for the stimulus bill. All the pork in it was Democratic pork.
Re:what stimulus package? (Score:3, Informative)
Not a single Republican in the House voted for this. Only the 3 RINOs in the Senate voted for this. The House Minority Leader threw the bill on the floor of the House [youtube.com] after calling the Democrats out for breaking their promise to provide 48 hours to review the bill. Just out of curiosity, how many of the 1,073 pages have you read in the ~36 hours the bill has been available? Did you notice all the handwritten changes [youtube.com].
Re:What open source health technology systems? (Score:3, Informative)
And, double check the facts (Score:4, Informative)
US corporate taxes are the second-highest in the world behind Japan.
Is that statutory rates, or effective rates [uhttp]?
Also note that we're pretty solidly on the low end in personal income tax.
You can call US taxes a lot of things, but "low" is not one of them, especially considering the services what we get from the government in exchange for the taxes we pay.
If you want to argue that we could potentially be getting a better return on our tax dollars, then I'll agree. If nothing else, the example of per-capita public health spending comes to mind -- for a smaller amount, many other countries pull off universal insurance coverage. And I'm sure that aside, there's always work to do -- I think it'll be a long time before either by active policy study or by the evolutionary algorithm of competitive markets we've discovered most of the easy efficiency gains.
But if you want to argue that the U.S. isn't a pretty good place to live or do business, or if you want to argue that tax contributions to that are negligible, I'm off that boat.
RedHat is already onboard. (Score:2, Informative)
A bit of time with the Google reveals Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform [redhat.com] which likely is the reason for this being included.
A quick review of the literature shows that several hospital software vendors have been converting their offering to run on a RHL backend.
That's likely where the main open source offerings will appear, replacing mainframes with cheap linux server solutions, and some database apps.
Re:what stimulus package? (Score:2, Informative)
You conclusion does not follow. Just because Republicans didn't vote for it (in the House, not in the Senate) doesn't mean that no Republican pork was added. They knew it would pass and in committee they DEFINITELY added their own pet projects to the bill under the guise of "improving it so that they could possibly support it".
"The Democrats did everything right and pure, did nothing wrong, only the evil Republicans added bad pork!"
Perhaps it escaped your notice, but the Republicans were completely [irnnews.com] shut out [ajc.com] of the negotiations for the bill. Pelosi's new rules completely barred Republicans for offering any amendments whatsoever to the stimulus. It was written and negotiated behind closed doors, by Democrats, without Republican input at all. And yet you want to blame them for bad content in a bill that they had no part of? Hell, even Obama was willing to talk with them, but power-drunk "I'm above the law" Pelosi didn't care. She wanted it passed her way, and broke her own promises to allow the bill to be read, because she wanted to go to Europe.
And then, they voted on the bill without even reading it.
Transparency and bipartisanship my hairy ass.