than the sum of the parts is a real opportunity for open source. There is actual interchange
of ideas going on here, unlike what I see currently in the vendor world in healthcare.
The great interchange of ideas that was going on in the OMG HDTF seems to have subsided
with a few important exceptions. It seems that interoperability along the OMG lines, at least,
has dropped off of the vendor priority list, just when it has become important. I always
wanted more users/customers to go to those meetings and tell the vendors what they want.
The meetings are some of the most technical of any meeting I've been with vendors and is
a way for a user to tell the vendor what they may want to purchase a few years out. We
also were able to have some influence on the vendors ourselves. However, the major ones
once they realized that enabling interoperability might actually hurt their profit margins,
pulled out.
The small ones don't have enough market influence.
This seems to be the issue with Open Source, but by working together we might be able
to have much more influence. If Vista (and others) would, for example, adopt the idea of functional
interoperability not simply data interoperability, we could begin to get some traction. Systems
would be able to share and exchange data and we could have a variety of systems working together.
Dave
At 10:35 PM 6/7/2003 -0500, Tim Cook wrote:
The key goal for opensource healthcare IT should be to combat this balkanization via schema and communication standards adoption.
Later, Tim
