I am a doctor in solo practice. One of the last of a dying breed. Despite that, I have always prided myself on using the best available technology. I was an early adopter of electronic medical records and tablet PCs, and have realized significant savings from that in the ability to have a smaller, leaner, staff.
My most recent tablet, an HP TX2500, came with Vista installed. Of course I had heard the Vista complaints, but thought to myself, meh, it's been out for a couple of years, that has to be old hat.
Wrong. Vista was a dog. On a dual-processor PC with 3 gigs, it was locking up tighter than Cell Block 3 on a bad lunch day, at least 3 times daily. I was averaging 4-5 hard reboots daily, and has anyone sat through one of those? By the time Vista had its act together and the virus software was happy, I'd already seen 3 more patients and made a cup of coffee. I was getting behinder and behinder.
I've been using OpenOffice and Firefox for years, so I began investigating using Ubuntu. First the CD loader, then as a dual-boot machine. Then, by accident one day, I erased Vista. :shock: Now what? Press the recovery disks into service, or forge ahead?
I took a deep breath, and decided to migrate to Ubuntu on my laptop. I know that's not how you're supposed to to things -- especially because I'm my own IT staff -- but one of the advantages of owning a small business is being able to move on a dime.
Honestly, the first two weeks were hell, as I tried to get things working. I briefly considered other distros, but came back to Ubuntu as the level of peer support on this forum and elsewhere is extraordinary. And 10 days into it, I nearly threw in the towel.
But, gradually, more and more of my necessary applications came back online. And as of Friday, I have a laptop that is every bit as capable as the one I left behind in Vista -- no, make that *more* capable. No more lockdowns, freeze-ups, BSOD. A fast-booting, responsive machine that feels more like a sports car in my hands than a bloated minivan with flat tires.
I have stylus, and handwriting recognition which, although it would *seem* to be less effective, is actually more efficient at recording my notes than the Windows TIP ever was. The EMR system, one of the most finicky pieces of...software that I ever installed, works seamlessly through an XP VM on my Ubuntu laptop -- as do a few other legacy apps that I'm forced to continue using because vendors tend to recognize only the XP world.
Sure, I had to roll my sleeves up and dig into the command lines, and ask a lot of questions on the fora, and ate up a truckload of my free time...but now I'm looking at the payoff.
Because the rest of the office will be due for upgrades over the next couple of years. And do you know how cheaply you can get desktop systems that don't have Vista installed on them? Yup. In three years, my entire practice will be open systems based.
We'll have to look at migrating other apps to Ubuntu, like accounting, medical billing and the like. I am already moving to Open EMR, as my old EMR is beginning to creak under the load, and in this economy and the HMOs stealing money from me on a daily basis, I'm unwilling to shell out $10,000 for another proprietary system with it's mandatory monthly "support" fees.
Although it is still early in the game, I'm pretty sure that my business investment in Ubuntu will save me another pile of cash in the long run.
Migrating to Ubuntu was, in my mind, the smartest business move I've made in years.
Dr. Avery L. Jenkins www.averyjenkins.com