The United States recently ushered in a new CIO for the federal government. President Obama has directed the CIO to “work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations.” Open source offers a compelling means to achieving these goals, harnessing the power of peer review and transparency of process and drawing on an ecosystem of thousands of developers and customers across the globe to drive innovation.

Healthcare IT presents an industry ripe for innovation and change. The new CIO appointment comes on the heels of the recent economic stimulus bill which includes legislation on healthcare IT that is of significant interest to the open source community.

An open source health IT system holds tremendous potential to improve the quality of the healthcare delivery system and make it more efficient. The current marketplace has had limited success in improving healthcare IT. Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology is a prime example. A July 2008 study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that only 4% of physicians in the United States had a fully functional EHR, and 13% had a basic EHR. In addition, the study also found that 2/3 of physicians cited affordability as the key barrier to EHR adoption.

We wanted to highlight two specific items that were part of the Health IT language in the stimulus package. First, the National Coordinator for Health IT is empowered to support “the development and routine updating of qualified EHR technology.” The federal government has already developed an open source health IT system, VistA, that is in use today by many private hospitals. For example, Midland Memorial Hospital, one of just 33 hospitals nationally certified as HIMSS Analytics Stage 6 of EHR adoption, replaced its existing proprietary systems with an open-source solution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and VistA. We’re hopeful that the federal government will continue to adopt an open source approach to the development of any qualified EHR technology and welcome creative solutions to the problem, and the direct support of the National Coordinator should help move these efforts forward.

The second piece of HIT language in the stimulus bill calls for the funding of a study on the availability of open source health IT systems to be completed no later than Oct. 1, 2010. This includes comparing the total cost of ownership of open source to existing proprietary commercial products. Open source solutions deliver high value at a low cost and this study provides the opportunity for the open source community to demonstrate the value we’ve been delivering for years. Red Hat has helped organizations across the healthcare field lower IT costs while maintaining high system availability to enable enhanced patient care. This language is the first piece of ratified federal legislation that explicitly uses the terms “open source.”

The true power of open source software comes from the collaborative development model that empowers all users of the software to contribute to its development. An open source health IT system would help modernize and streamline the nation’s healthcare system. It could be freely adopted by any healthcare provider, vendor, or clinician, enabling greater deployment of electronic medical records. Providers and vendors would have a strong incentive to integrate open source software and focus their energies on software innovation and better service and support.

We believe that the U.S. government has made a step in the right direction by considering open source in the health IT language. Red Hat is an active supporter of these provisions and we look forward to continued progress in healthcare IT.

Lately there has been increasing national attention around electronic health records. Most recently, this issue was highlighted in last week’s Presidential debate as one of the solutions our country should consider in our efforts to modernize and streamline the nation’s healthcare system. This issue was further examined by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in a recently published whitepaper, “Electronic Health Records: A Global Perspective”. The detailed HIMSS report identifies standardization and interoperability as one of the four primary factors affecting the implementation of electronic health records around the world.

We are working with partners and customers to overcome standardization and interoperability challenges. Most recently, Chuck Mosher, Principal Architect for Red Hat’s MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform, and Dave Nesvisky, VP Healthcare, Red Hat, conducted a SOA in Healthcare webinar to discuss how our MetaMatrix technology helps to solve today’s healthcare interoperability challenges . MetaMatrix has been used to secure and integrate healthcare applications with Epic, InterSystems Caché, and other data sources. By providing a single real-time, read/write standard interface to multiple data sources, MetaMatrix can turn different data silos into a single information repository, making a single view of patient data a reality.

View the archived SOA In Healthcare webinar or download the “Enabling Epic Clinical Interoperability with MetaMatrix” white paper to learn more, or visit us at www.redhat.com/healthcare.

We’ve met with many healthcare providers who have asked us about our Service Oriented Architecture and middleware solutions, specifically for the healthcare sector. In talking to these customers about the problems they face, we see a recurring theme: healthcare information is complex and scattered across multiple siloed data sources. These data sources include relational databases, flat files, XML and proprietary applications accessed via web services. Providing a single view of all these data sources requires more than just deploying a middleware SOA solution.

Red Hat’s solution to this problem is coupling our JBoss Enterprise Middleware with our MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services product. Learn more about how healthcare organizations are using Red Hat’s SOA for healthcare by downloading our SOA in Healthcare overview and registering for our SOA for Healthcare webinar. Also, check out our SOA Resource Center.

Dr. Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, gave the visionary keynote on Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit, where over 1,000 Red Hat customers, partners and employees have gathered at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Dr. Halamka, an avid Red Hat user in the data center, spoke around two major themes in healthcare. First, he discussed how open standards in healthcare such as those led by the American Health Information Community will serve as a catalyst for improving the quality of care and efficiency in the U.S. Second, personalized medicine based on individualized analysis of genomic data will be used to diagnose and treat patients in a fundamentally different way. Open source is a key enabler for these changes: driving innovation, lowering cost and providing the basic infrastructure necessary for these trends to become a reality.

Midland Memorial Hospital, a 400-bed hospital in Midland, TX, uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Medsphere to provide a complete, robust electronic medical record solution. Medsphere provides commercial support for the open source VistA EMR system that was originally developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Philip Longman wrote a great article about VistA in 2005 that’s well worth a read. Midland Memorial has deployed the Medsphere system on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for stability, knowing that Red Hat can be counted on to provide world-class support for the hospital. Since deployment, Midland Memorial has never experienced an unanticipated failure with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For more information about Red Hat solutions for healthcare, visit us online.

Mr. HISTalk was gracious enough to recently spend some time interviewing Dave Nesvisky about Red Hat and healthcare. Dave talks in detail about the growing adoption we’ve seen of open source solutions in the healthcare industry, as well as how we’ve seen success with more than just Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Dave and the rest of us have been keeping busy with all this interest in Red Hat’s presence in the industry, for more information, see here.

Last week, iHealthBeat posted an 8 minute audio interview discussing the recently announced Open Health Tools consortium. Open source and healthcare has the potential to change the current healthcare IT landscape, enabling healthcare IT vendors to focus on what truly differentiates systems instead of forcing them to invest in developing basic infrastructure. Collaboratively, OHT will focus on developing free, open source healthcare IT infrastructure for use by anyone.

LinuxInsider recently published a case study on Florida Hospital and how they’ve used open source software to address challenges around reliability and cost. For more details, read the Red Hat case study of Florida Hospital or visit us online.

Red Hat is pleased to announce that we’re joining the Open Health Tools (OHT) open source community. OHT is working closely with a broad spectrum of healthcare groups, including: major national healthcare providers in areas such as Canada, Australia and the UK; healthcare standards groups like IHTSDO and HL7; healthcare policy groups such as HSSP; and software providers such as Red Hat. OHT’s ultimate goal is to collaboratively build software tooling that will enable the seamless electronic exchange of healthcare data. This is an ambitious goal, but with incremental steps, we think it can be achieved.

The first OHT project is the HL7 tooling project, which will take some of today’s HL7 tooling to the next level.

We are tremendously excited about the potential enhancements that open source can provide to the healthcare industry. Semantic interoperability is a huge challenge, and we believe the only way that we can achieve this goal is through a collaborative, open source development model that brings together all stakeholders.

Health IT has tremendous potential in addressing the major challenges we face in healthcare: improving patient safety and quality of care and managing costs while improving efficiency.

One of the most visible challenges that health IT faces is the question of protecting privacy. If patient privacy cannot be protected, patients will not trust a system with accurate, complete medical information, rendering the system useless.

Properly designed, greater adoption of health IT offers the potential to improve patient privacy. For example, electronic records enable patients to selectively give access to parts of their medical record to specific individuals. Electronic records can also audit access to medical records. Neither of these are practical with paper records.

Last month, the Alliance for Health Reform and the Divided We Fail initiative hosted a luncheon briefing on privacy and health IT to discuss ways to move forward and break the legislative logjam over privacy. Jodi Daniel from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, Deborah Peel from Patient Privacy Rights and John Rother from the AARP spoke about various technology, market and legislative approaches to addressing the issue of health privacy. One approach they did not discuss was open source.

Open source can provide a crucial level of transparency into how an electronic medical record or personal health record works. Today, we can understand the privacy and security protections of the traditional paper medical record system. As healthcare transitions to an electronic medical system, the public must be assured that these systems actually do what they claim to do in protecting patient privacy and security. Deborah Peel’s Privacy Rights Certified is moving in the right direction in creating an independent organization that will certify personal health records and electronic medical records. However, in order to ensure complete accountability, experts must be allowed to examine actual implementations instead of treating these systems as black boxes. Otherwise, certification organizations will have to rely on vendor assertions to “prove” patient protections, and any privacy violations will only be discovered after medical data is exposed. Medical records contain some of the most sensitive data about an individual, and patient trust and privacy can only be achieved if appropriate protections are put in place.

For more about why open source makes sense for healthcare IT, visit the Red Hat healthcare site.