Article on Open Standards

Here’s a very interesting article on open standards and let me preface this blog post by saying I’m not trying to bash open standards. However, whenever you see that someone from IBM is talking about open standards you have to take it with a grain of salt. That is just like someone from Microsoft talking about how great Microsoft products are. IBM has been investing and positioning itself in the open source market for a while now.

That said, I also disagree that not having an open system is going to shut you out in the future as described in the article. Windows is still around right? More importantly, open source software is best when you are building a standard product like a web server. Sure, there are a few different features that people like, but in the end it is a pretty basic idea. You request a page and it delivers it. Healthcare and EMR is a very dynamic field and product and each person practices medicine a little bit different. This makes open source difficult to implement in the healthcare field and open source EMR in particular.

I do hope that many of the open source packages develop into a viable EMR option, because it could be a great piece of software for many doctors that don’t want to spend as much money up front. At least open source EMR could be great if CCHIT certification doesn’t kill open source EMR packages altogether.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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