Open Source Could Have Saved Ontario Hundreds of Millions 294
Platinum Dragon writes "Ontario's auditor-general released a blistering report this week detailing how successive governments threw away a billion dollars developing an integrated electronic medical record system. This CBC article highlights an open source system developed at McMaster University that is already used by hundreds of doctors in Ontario. As one of the developers points out, 'we don't have very high-priced executives and consultants,' some of whom cost Ontario taxpayers $2,700 per day."
The McMaster University researchers claim their system could be rolled out for two percent of the billion-dollars-plus already spent on the project. The report itself (PDF) also makes note of the excessive consultation spending: "By 2008, the Ministry’s eHealth Program Branch had fewer than 30 full-time employees but was engaging more than 300 consultants, a number of whom held senior management positions."
Other places to save money... (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked (through a contract company) at the Ontario Ministry of Health during the Y2K crunch, doing upgrades and support, handling a small team of guys.
It was a decent place to work, but the waste is incredible. We were getting paid 18 to 20 bucks an hour, but the companies handling us were either 2 or 3 deep. And each one took a cut.
One overheard phone call indicated that the top company in the food chain was getting over a hundred dollars an hour for some of us.
And another guy who was getting paid directly was whining on the phone about only making 125 dollars an hour managing the operation... though none of us ever saw him lift a finger to actually manage anything. The managers we reported to were great though.
So the contract companies took way too much money. That was issue number one.
The other was that for the amount of cubicles they had filled, it sure didn't seem like there was enough work to keep everyone busy. And as government employees they get good pay and LOTS of vacation.
And some people were getting paid WAAAY too much for what they were doing at work. Nothing like finding gigabytes of japanese teenagers pissing on things, and bestiality porn on a directors computer.
They must have buried that little discovery because when I Googled him last he was still working there.
Of course, on the plus side, since I was one of the more experienced guys I tended to stick by the phone to manage and support the other team members, and got to read Slashdot all day between phone calls and running down to help when one of the guys ran into trouble.
I wonder if I could get back on there.... :)
This article oversimplifies a complex problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Is there an open source software that does something pretty close to what they spent a pile of money building a custom solution for? Apparently there is.
Is the open source solution close enough to the needs of the Ontario government that, as the article alleges, all you need to do is buy some servers and set it up and there are negligible other costs? I seriously doubt it. I would be willing to bet heavily against it. Anyone who thinks otherwise probably hasn't spent much time developing software for government.
Probably they could have saved money by using the open source software as a starting point for customizations -- but they're going to have to do some, because the business model or set of civic statutes the software is built for aren't the same as what that particular government requires. Who does those customizations? Why, there you're probably back to hiring software consultants again.
I'm currently working on a government project (as a developer consultant) that's very similar to the idealized case laid out in the article, and it's not my first such project; in my estimation, in most cases, if you can repurpose something open source that's very similar to what the government agency in question is asking for, you can save maybe half the money of building a complete solution from scratch. At first you may estimate that you're going to be able to do a lot better than that, but as you get further into the project you find that there's just too many odd requirements unique to any given government entity or municipality that don't exist anywhere else and are completely inflexible because they're a matter of law.
So, yeah. You can save money, and that's a good thing, but you can't save what the dude in the article thinks you can save.
I used to work for Hamilton Health Sciences... (Score:3, Interesting)
... so I'm getting a real kick out of these replies.
Seriously, back in 2002 I was working at HHS, of which McMaster is a part. The pilot project I was on was looking for a solution to push out to relevant departments all over southern Ontario. It was a mess of completely unrelated databases and paper files. I remember looking at Oscar as a possible solution, and I was ooing and aaahing over it. Don't remember the details now, but it was really elegant and did everything it was supposed to be doing. I can only imagine what it looks like now, eight years later. I recommended it heartily to my superiors. Don't know what they did with it, if anything, once my contract ran out.
Good on ya, Mac!
Re:Government at its finest (Score:3, Interesting)
At least with the government, its possible to set up a health care system where the primary aim to provide universal healthcare. With the private sector the primary aim is always going to be to make money - and I would respectfully submit that turning a profit is not always the most important consideration.
This is how your hard-earned tax dollars are spent (Score:2, Interesting)
I've observed first-hand how ridiculous (publicly funded institution) spending is, in Ontario, and this does not surprise me in the least.
I used to work at a certain university in downtown Toronto. Rather than giving this task to their already 100+ employees (who usually had very little to do anyway) with CS or related degrees, they opted to hire 20+ external consultants at a rate of ~ $100,000 CAD / year (for a couple of years at least) to 'integrate' some proprietary 3rd-party product (ahem ... PeopleSoft!).
The alternative was to build a fully-customizable, easily-maintainable, more efficient, user-friendlier product themselves for essentially $0, as all of the employees who would build said project were already on salary.
Why? Liability. Rather than ensuring a product is up-to-snuff by their internal standards, by professionals who are more qualified to set those standards, and quickly writing fixes internally, the management preferred to have someone external to blame in case things went wrong. That way they could spend another $1M on consultants to fix the problem later on ;-)
It really makes you question how your hard-earned tax dollars are being spent.
Re:Perfect Example (Score:5, Interesting)
Does your car-insurance company try to screw you the same way?
Insurance companies (car insurance included) are renound for trying to screw over their customers and weasel out of paying out. As an example, if I crashed and wrote off my car tomorrow, the money I get from my insurance company will in no way buy me a car of the same age and condition - they will pay me the amount it'd cost me to get a rust-bucket of the same age at auction. Sure, it's better than nothing, but it still sucks. Luckily, so far all my insurance claims have been for stuff that was very clearly another driver's fault (there wasn't any weaselling-out-room) and didn't result in my car being written of, so the damage got fixed at no cost to myself.
Every year my car insurance company puts up my premium by about 50%, and so I cancel the policy and apply for a new one as a "new customer" - this isn't just one insurance company, *every* car insurance company I've used does this, on the assumption that the customer is too lazy to shop around. IMHO this sort of "disloyalty bonus" constitutes "screwing over the customer".
As another example, in the news today - the regulator has just slapped down a lot of mortgage payment protection insurance companies (i.e. those that pay your mortgage when you get made redundant) for doing too much weaselling out of payouts after the recession hit.
Re:The issues are not simple (Score:3, Interesting)
This is what Open Source software is up against. It's truly brutal. That said, never give up fighting, but it has to be done at the highest levels.
From the sounds of things, trying to do it at the highest levels, is exactly the *wrong* way to go about it.
UNIX was originally developed, so the story goes, with a couple of PDP-11s in an abandoned corner somewhere. Cheap, low profile, inconspicuous.
Likewise, if you're a sysadmin trying to get FOSS in the door, don't make a big noise about it. Go to a garage sale on the weekend, or a used electronics place, and buy a $200-$300 headless 3 ghz box, and then install FreeBSD on it at home over the weekend. Sneak it into the office next morning, and leave it quietly near your desk, hooked up to your other systems.
If the boss asks any questions, it's just a little something that you've got there, to pull out of your hat if the main system goes to hell, and you need to get back on your feet in a hurry. That's how most shops I've read about use OpenBSD. It might not be part of their standard deployment, but they have a single box sitting quietly and vigilantly in a corner somewhere; it's the proverbial phone booth [supermanhomepage.com] system.
Fear of change can be a healthy thing, if not taken to excess...but once management has seen Puffy save the day a couple of times, they'll come around. ;)