EHR War: Open vs. Proprietary

When members of a federal advisory group suggested recently that the government shouldn't be in the business of designing electronic health records, Rick Jung nearly fell out of his chair. Apprehending his attention was a comment that appeared in a post on this blog:

"I am nervous that the government is going to get into the EHR design business," said Judy Faulkner, chief executive officer of Epic Systems and a member of the Health IT Policy Committee, which advises the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. "We need to be careful about these committees not becoming the design committees for what the country will do."

Jung, chief operating officer at Medsphere, requested equal time. His company deploys an "open-source version of the world's most proven electronic health record system, the VistA EHR developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs over the course of two decades."

Obviously biased, Jung claims that his company's Vista derived product is a more effective solution and a better value. In West Virginia, he says, Medsphere deployed its system at a 1,200-bed facility for $9 million, a fraction of the $90 million total incurred by a similar facility of the same size that adopted Epic's proprietary system.