I was in the ED the other day and noticed that they use a mix of Windows 7 and Windows 10. My question is two part.
- Do you know of hospitals using Linux?
- Besides legacy software and unwanted downtime, is there any reason why they wouldn’t use Linux?
I know Linux has little to no penetration in health equipment firmware because a lot if not most of them have hard real-time requirements that Linux just doesn’t quite reach. QNX4 is a real-time Unix flavor that has been used in fancy graphical heartbeat/multi stat monitors. Its microkernel architecture allows for a watchdog to restart individual drivers so it’s more fault tolerant.
Microkernels for the win! Monolithic kernels can be built tiny though, so they are also pretty stable
There are hospitals running on SAP systems. Those servers will be 99% linux based. The rest are managed by crazy people.
Someone who works in hospital system posted about this in a comment earlier : https://lemmy.ml/comment/9989330
It's cause Epic/McKesson has complete control over the EMR world so everything has to work with them to some degree.
GNU health is great but I haven't seen where it could support the massive amount of legal and monetary hoops that Epic and co have to jump through as well.
For some reason there just isn't a lot of volunteer efforts/space for open source development in the healthcare world.
I worked for a device manufacturer that used Linux under the hood. It happens. Depends on what the staff knows and likes when designing.
