In 2004, health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies began focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices. The cure for IT cost bloat: moving many of McKesson's medical software applications to Linux, which could then be used on less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes.

It would be nice if medical professionals never lost patient information. But unfortunately, doctors and other healthcare specialists are only human. And the running cliché that doctors' handwriting is hard to read is often repeated for a reason. During his presentation at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Dr.

Until a few years ago, hardly a day went by without an article being featured on Linux Today about how “the year of Linux” had arrived. Every Linux user with a blog was willing to bet, year after year, that this was finally going to be “the year of Linux.” This was going to be the year when the public got wise, quit paying the Microsoft tax and moved over to the obviously superior Linux.

Red Hat started off on the NASDAQ in 1999 then moved to the NYSE in 2006. Two years later, the NYSE itself moved to Linux as the underlying operating system for trading operations. While financial services are a key vertical for Red Hat, it's not the only one.

It is becoming more and more clear to me that decision makers in healthcare policy and especially in healthcare IT policy do not understand the real underlying problems of interoperability in healthcare applications.

But as the US watches this debate unfold, many constituents may not realize that steps have already been taken to improve the US healthcare system, both with recent legislation and with 30-year-old software code--code that one company is harnessing with open source practices to improve clinical care across the country.

Ann Arbor's Linux Box, which has spent the last 10 years writing custom open-source software applications for a long list of clients, says its business is growing rapidly enough that it's likely to boost staff by 50 percent to 20 within the next year or two.

Financial and ERP applications are arguably the last bastion of proprietary software giants, but the Kuali Foundation wants to eliminate those remaining barriers to open source enterprise systems, at least in the educational realm.

Linux-based and open-source healthcare software has been around for years. Unless you were in health IT, however, chances are you never even heard of it. It's time to pay attention, because it may soon be tracking your medical records.