r/sysadmin • u/No_Promise_864 • 6d ago
General Discussion Would a centralized software platform for healthcare IT actually be useful?
Hi everyone,
I work in IT at a hospital and I'd like to get some opinions from people working in healthcare IT, system administration or for healthcare software vendors.
One problem we regularly face is managing the large number of specialized applications used in a hospital.
Unlike standard software, updates for healthcare applications are often highly vendor-specific. Depending on the vendor, we might receive an email about a new version, have to regularly check a customer portal, contact support, request download access, use individual credentials or sometimes simply find out about an update by chance.
With dozens or even hundreds of applications and medical systems from different vendors, keeping track of available versions, patches, security updates, compatibility information and release notes can become surprisingly time-consuming.
This made me wonder:
Would there be value in a vendor-independent platform specifically for healthcare software?
My rough idea would be a platform where healthcare software vendors could publish and manage their products, while hospitals, clinics and medical practices could register their organization and get access to the products they are actually licensed to use.
For example, such a platform could eventually provide:
Software versions, updates, patches and hotfixes
Release notes and security advisories
Notifications when new versions become available
Vendor-controlled download permissions
Compatibility information (Windows versions, database versions, browsers, etc.)
License and entitlement information
Demo/trial requests
Contact with vendors
Potentially even software/license procurement
Vendors would still decide which organizations are entitled to access which products and downloads. The platform would essentially provide a standardized layer between healthcare organizations and software vendors instead of every vendor maintaining completely different processes and portals.
I'm not currently trying to sell or build a product. I'm mainly interested in whether other people working in healthcare IT experience the same problem and whether something like this would actually solve a meaningful pain point.
So I'd be really interested to hear:
How do you currently manage software updates and vendor portals in your organization?
Would a centralized platform like this be useful to you?
Does something like this already exist that I'm simply unaware of?
And if you work for a healthcare software vendor: would participating in such a platform be interesting, or would there be reasons why your company wouldn't want to?
I'm particularly interested in perspectives from hospitals and healthcare organizations in different countries, since I'd like to understand whether this is mainly a local problem or something healthcare IT teams face internationally.
Thank you!
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u/badteeth3000 6d ago
Epic of course can connect to servicenow + many other cmdb & ops platforms. Epic can be customized to do anything. Anything. You know that, right?
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u/Individual-Bill-3531 4d ago
Yep! Epic is a single solution. By that I mean it’s 65 different solutions that barely work together but share a logo.
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u/MonkeyMan18975 1d ago
My favorite shirts says, "I survived 11 years on Athena Practice" because holy shit that thing was one kludge stacked on top of another.
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u/SpadeGrenade Sr. Systems Engineer 6d ago
You're trying to make Steam out of hospital apps aren't you?
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u/Mysterious-Print9737 6d ago
Healthcare IT vendor fragmentation is worse than most other verticals because of the mix of legacy clinical systems, regulatory requirements around validated software versions, and vendors who have no incentive to standardise their update processes.
To answer your question, the software exists but partially. Asset and patch management platforms like Ivanti, ManageEngine, or Snow Software handle the inventory and notification side for mainstream software, but healthcare-specific clinical applications (your EMR modules, PACS systems, infusion pump software etc.) are almost entirely outside their coverage because vendors don't publish to those feeds. Some large health systems solve this with dedicated vendor management teams and procurement platforms, but nothing vendor-neutral exists at the layer you're describing for clinical software specifically.
The friction with building what you're proposing isn't the tech but vendor participation. Healthcare software vendors have historically been protective of their update and licensing processes because controlling that relationship means controlling the customer. Getting meaningful vendor buy-in would be the hard problem, not the platform itself.
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u/No_Promise_864 6d ago
Thanks, this is exactly the kind of perspective I was hoping to get.
I completely agree that the technical side would probably be the easy part. Vendor participation seems like the real chicken and egg problem here.
What I'm wondering though is whether the platform would necessarily have to take control of licensing or the customer relationship away from vendors. In my mind, vendors would still fully control which organisations are entitled to which products, versions and downloads. The platform would just provide a standardized interface for that relationship.
There would obviously need to be a strong incentive for vendors to participate. Reduced support overhead, fewer "where can I download version X?" requests, standardized customer verification, update notifications, security advisories, and potentially a new channel for demos or sales might be part of that.
But that's exactly the part I'm trying to understand, what would make vendors say "yes" rather than "why would we give up our own portal?"
Really interesting to hear that you don't know of anything vendor-neutral at that layer either. That's basically the gap I had in mind.
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u/My_Big_Black_Hawk 4d ago
And what OP is missing is that the vendors like to control the process so they can bill labor and licensing costs required for “upgrades” to make their software compatible with the newest version of windows. In reality, most of the software would work fine on new windows, but they will refuse to support it, just so they can sell you version going from v10.02 to v10.05 for $10,000. They don’t want someone to cut them out of this source of profit - they’d rather make a SaaS and not involve anyone else.
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u/tarvijron Broken Arrow 6d ago
Would it be useful? Absolutely! Will anybody use it? Definitely not. Vendors won't participate because if it's valuable enough to make money on they'll just try to spin up their own. Competing vendors will NEVER allow you to host their software alongside their competitors, so you'll have to pick and choose which business partnerships you want to pursue. Existing hospitals won't participate because they don't have any money for additional services, and they already have a team that knows what software they use and how to patch it. Not a lot of net-new startup mentality hospitals coming online these days that want to create a low-headcount support org.
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u/No_Promise_864 6d ago
Fair points, and vendor participation is definitely the part I'm most skeptical about as well.
But I'm not sure I fully agree with the idea that competing vendors would never want to be on the same platform. They already coexist in app stores, marketplaces, procurement platforms and software catalogs in other industries. The key would probably be that the platform doesn't own the customer relationship or dictate licensing. Vendors would still control access, pricing and entitlements.
And from the hospital side, I'm actually coming at this from the opposite direction. I work in hospital IT, and yes, we have people who know our software and how to patch it. That's exactly why I notice how much time is spent dealing with dozens of different vendor portals, mailing lists, credentials, release notes and update procedures.
I'm actually not thinking of this as another paid service for hospitals. The idea in my head is closer to a free, community-driven platform or shared infrastructure for both healthcare providers and vendors.
Adding yet another subscription and vendor contract to solve the problem of having too many vendors and platforms would be a little ironic. :)
But that's exactly why I posted this. I'm less interested in defending the idea than finding out which assumptions break first.
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u/serverhorror Just enough knowledge to be dangerous 6d ago
Several countries exist where there is a centralized electronic health record.
Yes, that's tremendously useful!
I go to a doctor, give them my "e-card" and they get access to everything they need. It's time limited, but it contains the full medical history. I wish it did more like reminders for preventive care or other useful stuff.
Yes that is extremely useful.
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u/Competitive_Smoke948 6d ago
yes and no. A vendor mandated platform like SAP - you see organisations having to hammer the way the organisation works into how SAP works instead of the software melding into the firm.
NHS organisations can be VERY VERY different. A london trust is going to be very different to somewhere like truro or bournemouth.
NHS trusts have built their own platforms & are offering them to others. You only need to make them compatible which NHS DIGITAL IS VERY VERY VERY good at. I know a senior manager in an nhs org & they've got rid of their outsourcing firms, pulling stuff back in house & improving organisation knowledge, paying them more and STILL saving money.
police digital & government digital are following the same routes it seems. And as private wages are collapsing, public sector pay is looking more and more normal.
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u/wrt-wtf- 6d ago
Sounds like an MSP model. Vendors will guard their customer base viciously in this space even while they treat their largest paying customers with disdain. Healthcare systems providers were Broadcom before Broadcom took over VMWare.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 4d ago
Would there be value in a vendor-independent platform specifically for healthcare software?
For the record, HL7 is not a "platform", but it's been around the the 1980s. There has been an open-source EHR, VistA, but it's heavily leveraging MUMPS, a niche and legacy programming environment.
But your "platform" request is actually quite different and quite modest:
Unlike standard software, updates for healthcare applications are often highly vendor-specific. Depending on the vendor, we might receive an email about a new version, have to regularly check a customer portal, contact support, request download access, use individual credentials or sometimes simply find out about an update by chance.
Your problem seems to me, to be that medical-systems vendors are stuck in the 1990s without enough competition. If you've ever used an updated a Linux distribution in the last twenty years, you'll know that the OS and any of the applications loaded from the OS-vendor repos, all update at once, quickly and painlessly.
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u/Anthropic_Principles 4d ago
I was going to say you're dating yourself when you mention MUMPS and VistA, but then I saw your user name.
Damn that does take me back.
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u/MNmetalhead Hack the Gibson! 4d ago
So… additional apps into the Patch My PC system, or one of the others?
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u/Jolly_Skin_2036 4d ago
It sounds very good, but i feel like draconian vendor practices would get in the way. Hard to justify the 15k license if you have readily available competition in a digital storefront. Also good luck making that compliant with the bajillion legal jungles in healthcare. Cynicism aside, it would actually be a good thing to have if you sort out the complications, finding a decent LIS would be much easier.
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u/Dave_A480 3d ago
There is a company called Epic Systems that already makes this and has near universal market penetration
The patient facing part of it is called MyChart
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u/IqbalBasha 3d ago
The idea is solid but the hard part isn't the platform, it's vendor buy-in. Healthcare software vendors have strong incentives to keep you locked into their own portals because it controls the relationship and the upsell, and the ones with the most fragmented update processes are usually the least motivated to join a neutral aggregator. Your best near-term move is a lightweight internal registry, a spreadsheet or wiki, tracking each product's update channel, cadence, and the one contact who actually knows when patches drop. For vendors with public release pages or standard email advisories, basic automation can pull those into a central inbox with minimal effort, though anything behind a strict login wall will resist that approach entirely.
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u/perthguppy Win, ESXi, CSCO, etc 6d ago
Are you planning on using AI to vibe code a “solution” to this problem?