Healthcare Organizations Use Open Source to Control Costs, Increase Reliability

Healthcare organizations face constant pressure to reduce costs and, like most organizations, they are typically looking for these cost-reduction opportunities within expensive IT infrastructures.

Healthcare organizations face constant pressure to reduce costs and, like most organizations, they are typically looking for these cost-reduction opportunities within expensive IT infrastructures.

Certainly a general reduction in complexity would lower expenses. Healthcare technology is developed within federated, highly distributed, and usually very expensive systems. To reduce this complexity, healthcare organizations are trying to consolidate data and datacenters — and that opens up an opportunity to take advantage of the growth of Linux and open source technologies.

Virtualization, for example, is a natural solution for cost reduction. Organizations are finding they can securely host multiple services and materials on inexpensive commodity hardware. They’re replacing their proprietary hardware and their operating system at the same time, often re-hosting important legacy and homegrown applications within virtual machines on Linux and commodity hardware.

Of course, those cost savings can’t come at the expense of downtime, especially in the healthcare industry where lives depend on the reliability of mission-critical applications. And fortunately, as evidenced in the financial sector in recent years, reliability is one area where open source technologies have a lot to offer and have proven their capabilities.