The McMaster University researchers claim their system could be rolled out for two percent of the billion-dollars-plus already spent on the project. The report itself (PDF) also makes note of the excessive consultation spending: "By 2008, the Ministry’s eHealth Program Branch had fewer than 30 full-time employees but was engaging more than 300 consultants, a number of whom held senior management positions."

Hopefully more and more of these studies will be done on big projects and over time people will learn to at least strongly consider open source options. Especially when taxpayer money is involved it seems flat-out wrong to not investigate the potential savings offered by open source.