Alternative ways of financing and cooperation between customer and vendor lessons from Sao Paulo, Brazil Abstract People living in a chronically jeopardized economical situation are faced to two possible scenarios: the first (default), is to simple accept what is being offered (very little) and live on that; the second, a big challenge, is to use imagination and creativity as weapons against diversity in a try to modify the fate. After more than 20 years "on the road", the IT Department of the Heart Institute (InCor) of Sao Paulo University Medical School, Brazil, have always chosen the difficult track. Investment on people, rather than buying finished products, is being the trademark of this small team. It must be mentioned that foreign equipment, hardware and software are much more expensive in Brazil (taxes, dollar value, etc.), salaries on the other way are comparably lower than more developed countries. It would be unfair not to mention that InCor is privileged in comparison to sister Institutions in Brazil. The Hospital is well equipped to provide good quality care on cardiovascular diseases. Research and training are part of InCor activities. This talk will focus on how InCor's IT group succeeded into convincing the hospital executives of the importance of an integrated information environment. It will also address how some vendors were convinced to change their big-profit-oriented view into a better-little-than-nothing-view. Finally, it will be discussed how some companies can benefit from trading part of their profit into re-investment on local R&D, the vMon� (virtual monitoring system) case will be presented. Open source software used in healthcare can provide effective low cost solutions - PACS and other examples Abstract Open source can be used on critical mission applications. Despite most of the formal industry does not recognize the power of good software written on free software, complex and robust healthcare applications can be built upon this platform. InCor has many of its main software components using those products. Assembling vertical solutions for the healthcare market can be a good business for new companies. InCor's IT group is preparing a number of solution kits for hospital use. Some of those kits will be presented. A Web-based PACS system, that can be set up for a fraction of the price of commercial products, an LDAP-server, to be added as an access/certification module to new or existing medical systems, a fault-tolerant server based on a Linux cluster system, for critical mission applications, and a Java-based DICOM viewer, for medical images and signals.

Alternative ways of financing and cooperation between customer and vendor lessons from Sao Paulo, Brazil (ArcMed, Managing Software Projects)
Umberto Tachinardi, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Tuesday [11:15 - 12:00] Session Room 2

Slides from this presentation

Open source software used in healthcare can provide effective low cost solutions - PACS and other examples (ArcMed, Managing Software Projects)
Umberto Tachinardi, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Wednesday [13:00 - 13:45] Session Room 2

Slides from this presentation

Next speaker