Electronic Healthcare Records

"As the biggest player in the market, Epic has derived huge benefits from the $24 billion of incentive payments paid out by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to clinician and hospitals that adopt EHRs" Rand.

Download OpenVista (R) for free. OpenVista(R) is the open-source version of VistA, an enterprise grade health care information system developed by the U.S. Veterans Affairs and deployed at 1,500 global facilities. Sourceforge

Digital health funding reaches record $29.1B in 2021 (1/11/2022)

In 2021 the Federal government poured more than $29 billion into health information technology.
All that money produced proprietary, closed source, unauditable, software packages, covered by non-disclosure agreements. Naturally, these packages don't talk to each other because there was no standard. So, most likely, the doctor's office can't share data with the hospital, and hospitals cannot share data with each other.

Software, like other information, is extremely expensive to produce for the first copy, but every new copy afterwards has close to zero marginal cost.

Think what 29 billion might have done in the public sector. The public domain VA EHR system, free to download, could have become the standard. If the medical community used free software, many of the demonstrated problems would disappear.

Take, for example, software as a product. The first copy requires a large investment, but after that, the marginal cost of copies is near zero. Free software (as defined at fsf.org) is steadily improving, and it has the potential to be a public good. As a matter of citizenship and public policy, every citizen should prefer it.

We should carefully decide where to draw the line between public and private.

Bibliography

Redirecting Innovation in U.S. Health Care: Options to Decrease Spending and Increase Value Case Studies (RAND

Epic Systems, Leading Defense EHR Bidder, Slammed for Lack of Interoperability (10/2014)

10 EHR implementations with the biggest price tags in 2017