The battle lines on how to spend the money for technology to improve health care are beginning to be drawn. As a former director of an IT department at a health center which implemented a proprietary health record system in 2003, I can offer a useful perspective on some of the issues. Phillip Longman’s post on health records technology discusses the issue of using a closed versus an open source health records system, which is part of the larger debate on open source and its impact on application development online.