J Busser wrote: > A few doctors from various parts of Canada have gotten in touch to > ponder how to solve the dilemma wherein doctor groups may say > > "Open Source - it may be fine, but *who* will support it?" > > One group was looking at getting GNUmed further developed, and to > establish a company to provide local support. Right now, they are > "frozen", because commercial vendors have been able to destabilize the > process, with warnings that the group's Executive would be "crazy" and > other fear mongering. > > But anyway in the discussion it was suggested to me that any of IBM, > Unisys, Novell, Sierra Systems might be interested both in helping to > support Canadian doctors using GNUmed with whatever other additional > development would be required. Their interest would presumably be in > proportion to the size of the potential market for their services.
Those larger companies would want to fork GNUmed and re-write it to use their own products - not just the underlying version of Linux, but IBM would re-write GNUmed as a Web application to use DB2 and Websphere etc etc. That's how they make their money. > Or do people think it would be better for a medical association or group > to create a company to provide local support? The advantage would be > control. But would a big disadvantage be that even if you hired smart > people who understood the business of IT, you would be challenged to > "grow" (scale) the support as hopefully more doctors start to use GNUmed? Much better. The Malaysian PrimaCare system is your model here: a group of about 40 Malaysian GPs banded together to form PCDOM (see http://www.pcdom.org.my but site seems to be down right now) - "Primary Care Doctors' Organisation of Malaysia" - then financed teh writing of PrimaCare, their own medical information system, and then spun off a company to install and support it, not just in their own practices, but in many other practices across Malaysia. It is proceeding well. I think they got some funding from teh malaysian govt as well - after they started - but it is otherwise self-financing. > Also, some people in my area are running OSCAR. Would it make sense to > try to develop a support system (group/company) that supports more than > one Open Source software, or does *that* sound inadvisable? No reason not to support more than one system - probably esential due to economies of scale. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gnumed-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumed-devel
