Hospitals and medical practitioners have had to contend with numerous challenges such as interoperability, privacy, and business process pressures that have slowed their investment in information systems as compared to other industries. But new market drivers—both political and economic, are forcing the healthcare industry to turn to IT to improve its effectiveness and efficiency. In fact, one of the top priorities in the healthcare industry is to broaden the use of electronic records and other health information technology to help reduce costs and dangerous medical errors, and improve patient safety.

Healthcare applications including Practice Management Solutions, Electronic Medical Records (EMR) / Electronic Health Records (EHR), Monitoring Equipment, and Digital Imaging Systems all rely on a Clinical Data repository, which requires a high-performance transactional database for processing patient information. MySQL is the cost-effective, high performing and reliable data repository used by many of the leading solution providers including eClinicalWorks and MacPractice.

MySQL enables ISVs and OEMs to quickly deliver modern, flexible healthcare solutions and provides the following significant benefits:

• High Performance, enabling products to capture more clinical data as and when needed. This provides the healthcare providers the ability to do more granular analysis and the ability to grow to meet increasing demands over time.
• Reduced COGS and Improved Profitability by using a highly cost efficient database that allows vendors to offer healthcare solutions at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. MySQL's lower costs provide margin flexibility, so pricing can be more easily set to appeal to price-sensitive Small to Mid-Size payers.
• Multi-Platform Support MySQL supports over 20 platforms making it ideal for the healthcare industry in which a wide variety of platforms are used, including Mac OS, Windows, and increasingly Linux. Platform flexibility allows healthcare solution providers to more easily extend the size of their addressable markets.
• Ease of Installation & Configuration, so healthcare providers needn't be database experts to get a complete solution up-and-running quickly using an out-of-the box configuration.
• Zero Administration, eliminating the need to hire-in costly database administration skills to maintain the database, which is particularly valuable for smaller practices, which often lack full-time IT support.
• High Reliability so all of the data is captured at all times to meet regulatory requirements and to ensure providers have the information they need to provide patients with the highest levels of care.

White Papers

• White Paper: Guide to Choosing an Embedded Database
• White Paper: "A Visual Guide to Installing MySQL in Windows Applications"

Other Resources

• Why Product Managers Choose MySQL (ISV)
• Why Engineering VPs Choose MySQL (ISV)
• MySQL as an Embedded Database
• ISV / OEM Customers
• ISV / OEM Resources