What will it take for health care providers to adopt new health IT systems? Will it only come with government enforcement? If so, then how will the health care providers be able to afford it? Will this cause the smaller providers to move towards open source health IT systems and the larger organizations to choose the proprietary systems?

It appears to be the trend that has occurred. Those that can afford the costly proprietary systems will purchase them. However, those that cannot afford such an investment are looking towards open source health IT systems.

Under the American Revitalization and Recovery Act (2009), there are monetary incentives in place now for health care providers to begin to adopt health IT systems. Within this act, there is an additional provision that focuses solely on the aspect of open source health IT systems. This provision allows for research to be conducted over the next year to be presented in 2010 about its validity, effectiveness, security, durability, etc. in comparison to the proprietary health IT systems.

I hope to bring to light these differences in open source vs. proprietary systems that this study seeks to unveil.