How big a place for Misys open source in healthcare?
You can see this at its misysoss.com site. The site now features links to several bloggers focused on open source in healthcare, including this blogger.
The strategy outlined by CEO Mike Lawrie (right) at his sales meeting in Ft. Lauderdale is to let companies like Medsphere fight it out for the Electronic Health Record (EHR) business and instead focus on moving such records through Health Information Exchanges (HIEs).
Misys Open Source Solutions (MOSS) has proven to be a leader in the creation of the world's first IHE standards-based, open source health information exchange (HIE) infrastructure and plays an important independent role connecting healthcare communities.
General manager Bob Barthelmes, a former sales manager at IBM,said the new business model is based on services and support contracts, as well as licenses for clinical groupware products that will plug into its portal. Allscripts will continue to handle data transfers but that contract won't be exclusive.
"The exchange must remain agnostic to the source systems and the core platform must be open. Blackbox solutions for interoperability is an oxymoron and doesn't work any longer."
Maybe. But it appears the government is going to establish the open platform for health data transfers through NHIN Connect, which already has an open source commitment. Plugging open source into open source doesn't give you double the open source.
Misys has been extremely successful in the finance area the last few years, and while their new-found commitment to open source is admirable, I have to ask whether this is a long term customer strategy or a short-term M&A strategy?
Time will tell.