Jose Lacal, founder and chief vision officer of OpenPHI’s HealthAlbum, raised an interesting point during his presentation last week at SugarCon that I think underscores one of the biggest advantages with open source. In a nutshell, Lacal presented his vision for using SugarCRM to revolutionize one of the largest and most difficult sectors to conduct business with in the U.S. economy: healthcare.

During the course of the presentation, I asked for his thoughts on how the healthcare sectors’ snail-like adoption of electronic medical records (EMR) is inhibiting the acceptance of new, more efficient customer-facing procedures. Lacal’s answer surprised even me, as there’s been almost no adoption of EMR solutions on any sizeable scale. The primary culprit: big, unwieldy, proprietary solutions.

Lacal mentioned a number of sound open source EMR alternatives that exist in the marketplace today, which besides being more flexible, are much cheaper than the $1 billion California spent attempting to adopt an EMR solution the past few years. But until the time comes when medical records are transferred electronically, I guess dealing with insurance companies and doctors will continue to resemble something like this: