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.