I overheard a discussion among the categorical medicine internsI was supervising Friday pm in the outpatient area.
They were grumbling about having to come back to the University Hospital and it's SMS/Semiens Envision system and having to leave CPRS/VistA at the VA. Then when one of them said he had heard it was free they were outraged that we didn't have it at the University Hospital! I had to go into a limited discussion of the difficulties of carving out the CPT codes and encrypted parts for FOIA. I didn't even get into the interface creation and data dictionary harmonization parts. But, I told them to talk it up among their colleagues. This is the kind of pressure that will eventually force CIOs to look at open-source medical software. Maybe we will be shamed into it by our young colleagues who download software from the web all the time!
