Dozens of traditional IT companies — from Cisco Systems to Xerox — are generating PR coverage at this week’s huge HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) conference in Orlando. But so far, only a few savvy firms — such as IGEL Technology — are weaving open source messaging into this prominent vertical market event. Translation: The open source industry may miss yet another opportunity to prove its vertical market expertise.
First, let’s look at the big picture. A quick check of the news wires this morning revealed major healthcare-related statements from:
- Avnet (the big distributor is promoting its healthcare ISVs)
- Cisco (mobile healthcare)
- Dell (partnering on patient care systems)
- IBM (Virtual healthcare on Second Life)
- Lawson Software (more than 100 healthcare providers are using its mobile applications)
- Nortel and Polycom (TelePresence for hospitals)
- Xerox (document management for healthcare)
Of course, not all of the releases are compelling. Plenty of companies throw useless information out on the news wires in lame attempts to generate noise.
But this is HIMSS, the biggest health care IT event of the year. Any IT company that has healthcare expertise needs to associate its name with this event.
Yes, there’s still plenty of time for open source companies to chase this ambulance. The HIMSS event runs through February 28 in Orlando.
Some open source companies — such as Red Hat — understand the value of vertical market messaging and have joined HIMSS. But you don’t have to be a big open source voice to make noise at HIMSS.
Thin client specialist IGEL Technology, for one, says it has partnered with Philips Speech Recognition Systems to bring digital dictation and speech recognition solutions to its Linux firmware. Healthcare is among the system’s target markets.
Other open source companies would be wise to crank up their vertical marketing efforts. Their current silence at HIMSS and complete silence at January 2008 retail trade show reveal that most open source companies have yet to discover the power of vertical market trade shows.
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Actually, I’m typing this from an OpenSource webtv-ish like thing at Strong Hospital. Websites say I’m running linux with a modded Firefox, and the system did respond to typical linux keyboard shortcuts. The system is called,’getwell:)network’
if you want to look it up.
This is why we have added DOHCS as an annual event at SCALE. The health it vertical is ripe with opportunity for open source solutions providers.
There were actually a lot of open source announcements at the HIMSS conference. These include some significant announcements from Medsphere and DSS in regards to the implementation of the Veterans Health Administration’s VistA platform in the private sector. In addition major players in the healthcare industry including Misys and McKesson also had significant announcements regarding their open source strategies.
At the same time HIMSS is very hostile to open source as an organization. They have been leading the lobbying against VistA and an open source approach to fixing the healthcare crisis in Congress (where open source in healthcare is a MAJOR topic of discussion as well as the subject of large number of congressional hearings). HIMSS represents what is the equivalent of hundreds of mini-Microsofts who seek dominance in their areas of healthcare business by using proprietary interfaces and data formats (thus the fundamental problem with lack of interoperability in the healthcare industry).
As mentioned by Ilan above, if you want to see good presentations on open source in healthcare, there was a full-day of presentations at the SCALE 2007 conference in Los Angeles. I understand that the presentations as well as video of the sessions will soon be posted to the SCALE web site.
Oops, I meant to say SCALE 2008 conference. The conference had a full-day session on open source in healthcare. It was called Demonstrating Open-Source Healthcare Solutions (DOHCS).
This was far and beyond the best overview conference that I had attended on the subject and there were some very good presentations. This was particularly impressive in that the conference is organized and run entirely by volunteers. The web site for the conference is:
http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale6x/