Healthcare providers and the government have steadily been waking up to the significant cost savings and efficiency boosts that open source software and open systems can offer. Today Black Duck Software, which maintains a knowledgebase of more than 200,000 open source projects, has announced results of research it has done on estimating the cost savings that open source software can bring to healthcare organizations. The company used a cost estimation model called COCOMO to put some numbers on the opportunities that health care organizations have, which look to be promising.

The Obama administration is committed to overhauling government spending on technology by adopting open source solutions, and healthcare professionals are increasingly heeding the call of open source. This week brings an important step in empowering healthcare IT organizations to tie into the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN), a federal initiative to facilitate the electronic exchange of health information. The open source inititiative is called Connect. It consists of open source software and accompanying documentation, available here. As Matt Asay notes, "the goal is to reduce the cost and complexity of tying into the U.S. national health information network, with three of the largest federal healthcare provider organizations, Defense and Veterans Affairs departments plus the Indian Health Service, each participating in Connect."