Mission Critical: Health Care gets a Red Hat by risa
Open source systems for health care and education have always struck me as the most important and obvious places for the ethics and processes of os to make themselves understood. Chronically underfunded systems, these also represent huge international markets. Don’t doubt that propritary vendours have been knocking on hospital and school doors all over the world (metaphorically and physically) for a long time, trying to sell their wares to people trying to figure out how to keep essential services afloat through times of crisis.
Open systems for education and health care (which I’ve been trying to keep an eye on over at Sourceforge as they develop) can sound geekily utopian and be as tricky to pick as any other system- there are lots of options, lots of forks, lots of different good ideas about what such a system might need and what bugs should get fixed first. When choosing an os program you need to be pretty rigorous about looking past appearances to see whether there is a healthy community behind the project that sincerely believes their work is being responded to and built on to be given away in all the right ways. Red Hat is the open source Industry leader and by teaming up with Fortune 500 health care company McKlessen to offer an Entreprise linux for Healthcare, a sturdy, supported, open protocal and standard compliant option seems assured. The best part: any investment in an open source area of development is an investment in all of open source. The public code gets a shot in the arm with new developments like this, as the Red Hat license fundamentally insists, and other os Healthcare and other large organizational projects not aimed at Entreprise license and support business models, should benefit as well. Competition behaves a little differently in this environment..
“Our healthcare customers require highly reliable systems with highly responsive support,” added Simpson. Doctors, nurses and other clinical staff are depending on these systems to care for patients, 24/7. The Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform fits seamlessly with McKesson’s commitment to product quality and customer service.
As a leading provider of technology solutions to the healthcare industry, McKesson has been at the forefront of innovative technologies, deploying many of its advanced Horizon Clinicals® applications on Linux running on Intel-based hardware. Hospitals with these deployments have already realized cost savings of up to 60% compared with traditional system deployments.
“Over time, we have evolved our approach to system reliability in healthcare,” said Kay Carr, chief information officer at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, Texas. We used to focus on redundant hardware for disaster recovery, with an emphasis on back-up and restore procedures. That was a costly but necessary approach at the time. Innovative technologies like Red Hat Enterprise Linux have allowed us to transform our approach to one of continuous availability. Now we’re deploying our McKesson clinical applications on multiple, inexpensive, commodity-based servers set up in separate locations for site-to-site failover. With this highly flexible approach, we have the mission-critical reliability we need for patient care at a much lower cost.
Red Hat’s core platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has been widely adopted as a robust and economical open architecture alternative in other industries that demand highly reliable systems. Red Hat maintains a single Enterprise Linux distribution that has been extensively tested across a wide range of computing environments. Prior to incorporation, all new features are vetted throughout the open source development community to ensure seamless integration and reliability.”
Read the press release in full on the McKlessen website.
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