“If humans were as ’simple’ as cars or computers, we would have outsourced healthcare to foriegn countries years ago and saved a bundle. Oh wait a sec, I just read where India is doing that very thing!”

Outsourcing’s got to stop. Hospitals should control health IT locally. Outsourcing may be appriopriate for an IT call center, but not for care and feeding of health IT.

If humans were as ’simple’ as cars or computers, we would have outsourced healthcare to foriegn countries years ago and saved a bundle.
Oh wait a sec, I just read where India is doing that very thing!

You question my motivation and imply there is a lack of coverage in my choice of evidence in saying “Both sets of authors are open source advocates and proprietary system critics, so when they rip commercial systems while lauding open source ones, you have to think about the subject they chose to write about, whether their data are optimal or simply conveniently available, and whether their conclusions are supported by their facts.” The article states that it sets out to explain a contradiction between the success of Cerner commercially and the negative attitude of clinical staff to it. Such an objective must clearly provide the evidence for the negative viewpoint given that the commercial success of Cerner is self-evident. Hence by definition of the objectives the negative evidence has to be provided to the reader. However I have provided in the essay EVERY piece of positive evidence that I found from the NSW clinical staff and that sent to me from overseas staff, but not every piece of negative evidence.

To characterise me as an”open source advocate and proprietary system critic” is invalid by your criteria, that is you have no evidence for that as a generalisation. It is quite true I have advocated open source would solve the problem of vendor lock-in and I also believe that open source is important for State wide mission critical software systems in Australia given that the majority of our hospital services are provided by the State, but I am only a critic of Cerner Firstnet ( or Farcenet as it is being called here) AND the deployment methods used by NSWHealth/Cerner. I consider systems such a state wide build of an Emergency Department Information System as part of a health infrastructure and so the idea that the State cannot maintain such a system in its own manner as inappropriate. I have not criticised any other software manufacturer and my Lab works on other commercial systems where our research software is deployed to add enhancement functionality for Clinical Data Analytics (see CLINDAL on our web site, http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~hitru).

At the risk of opening a political can of worms. Let’s deport the illegal aliens. One swoop 30 million uninsured off the rolls.