All medical technology is insanely expensive.<p>My wife is an ophthalmologist in private practice, and we&#x27;ve spent far too much money on diagnostic equipment.<p>My most frustrating single experience was spending $18,000 on a refurbished visual field last year (the machine where you see flashes of light in your peripheral vision and push the button), and having it show up running a custom version of Windows 3.1 and an actual honest-to-god 3.5&quot; floppy drive.<p>My current project is trying to figure out how to get digital visual testing systems (e.g., eye charts on a monitor) setup in her exam rooms.  If I were to buy a system from a medical distributor, I&#x27;d be spending something like $2,000 - $4,000 per room.<p>With an Atom-powered mini-PC, I could get Windows hardware and a monitor setup in every room for about $300&#x2F;room. I was hoping I&#x27;d be able to find some open-source visual acuity software, but it doesn&#x27;t seem to exist.  Most software-only solutions are still over $1,000 per-license per-room.  The best-looking and most reasonably priced Windows software I&#x27;ve found is $400&#x2F;room.  Bringing my total cost to a (somewhat painful) ~$700&#x2F;room.<p>There is one piece of good Visual Acuity software in the Mac App Store[2] that we&#x27;d be able to deploy in all 4 of our exam rooms with a single $99 license.  So with 4x Mac Minis plus monitors, our per-room price would be pretty close to $700&#x2F;room going that way too.  But it seems like such a waste to spend $500 on a Mac Mini that will do nothing besides display some letters and symbols.<p>What I&#x27;d love to see is industry associations working together to produce open source software that solves problems like this.  Visual testing software isn&#x27;t complex.  A fairly reasonable investment could get something open source developed that would lower the cost of healthcare across the country, and worldwide.<p>There are about 58,000 Ophthalmologists and Optometrists practicing in the United States.  If we assume they average 2-lanes each, and open source software could lower the cost of visual acuity testing in each lane from $2,000 to $300, that would save $98-million.<p>1. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;konanmedical.com&#x2F;chart2020&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;konanmedical.com&#x2F;chart2020&#x2F;</a>
2. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kybervision.com&#x2F;mac&#x2F;visualacuity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kybervision.com&#x2F;mac&#x2F;visualacuity&#x2F;</a>