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?