Red Hat Makes Healthcare Debut

March 2, 2007: McKession has signed a new deal with Red Hat to bring the healthcare industry a viable open source platform on Intel hardware, and provide a cost effective alternative when migrating from legacy systems.

The deal is a first for Red Hat in the health care industry and will be able to deliver, according to Michael J. Simpson, chief technology officer for McKesson Provider Technologies, safe, high-quality patient care using McKesson's clinical applications.

Simpson also said that the introduction of an open platform designed specifically for the needs of healthcare IT represents a major step forward in encouraging the use of open source technologies instead of closed, proprietary technologies that are costly to acquire, maintain and scale.

The enterprise healthcare platform packages offered by the pair will include Red Hat’s suite of open source products and services, customer support and services, as well as other open source technologies such as JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

"Our healthcare customers require highly reliable systems with highly responsive support," noted Simpson. Doctors, nurses and other clinical staff depend on these systems to care for patients around the clock, so stability and usability is paramount.

McKesson claims that hospitals that deploy its Horizon Clinicals running on Linux can attract savings of up to 60% over traditional systems.

Comment on this story