My wife works in a hospital, and hates Cerner. That's one more datapoint. But it's absurd to say that pursuing open-source models would improve this. Whether t

My wife works in a hospital, and hates Cerner. That's one more datapoint. But it's absurd to say that pursuing open-source models would improve this. Whether the software is open or proprietary, the real barrier to what the author writes about is that hospital IT departments aren't up to the job. It seems that generally, hospital IT is little more than Help Desk and report builders. They can set up a new desktop PC or backup the server. They can write some reports or export data for financial modeling. But actually developing the hugely-complex hospital management systems, with medical records, billing, etc., all integrated together, is beyond the means of any hospital IT department I've ever heard of. So pursuing the author's ideas really has a prerequisite of changing the mindset of healthcare IT, tranforming the from helpdesk-related jobs into full-fledged developers.