CMS for hospital content

Hi,

for the last three years, I've been volunteering as the lead developer of a specialized CMS for hospital content and information management at a reasonably large European children's hospital. The software deals with patient records, finances and billing, patient scheduling, and various other healthcare-oriented data tasks, running under mod_perl and Apache. Substantial odds were presented against the software from the beginning: the social stigma of open source software (and especially the proclamation that the software I had written will also be open sourced) is still a prevailing problem both in management and I/T circles. Yet the software (originally restricted only to electronic patient records) has been running for two years without a single bug report, prompting the hospital administration finally to undertake a massive effort to expand the software, and transition fully to open source technologies for its operation - desktops and servers alike, a transition which I'm currently heading.

I'd like to present a "first person perspective" case study of the social and technological implications of open source content and information management in healthcare, with a concrete analysis of what makes Open Source attractive and unattractive in that market. Sharing the roadblocks I've personally encountered, I'd like to explain also what can be done to break them down, and speculate a bit on the future position of open-source CMS in healthcare, a strategically highly-valuable niche for Open Source to fill. Because the entire application also rests on Apache and mod_perl, I'd talk about why those precise technologies were selected, and what other technologies were employed to make a powerful CMS that runs in a mission-critical environment.


Best regards,
Ivan Krstic.