Medsphere is the company that's trying to take OpenVista, its product based on the VA's Vista EMR, to the commercial market. In order to get Vista ready for the commercial market they had to remove the Virginia-centric features, rewrite the user interface and re-architect the middleware layer using open-source technology. For commercial hospitals, they also had to enhance the charge capture features for patient billing. Their first client is a 425-bed, three-site hospital in Texas. OpenVista will cost the hospital roughly one-third the price of the big commercial competitors. The rest of healthcare IT is very curious to see if MedSphere can succeed in selling "free" software.
- read my article on The Health Care Blog