Maybe not, but for her use case a Chromebook (with it's low introductory price and no monthly subscription) would fit the bill perfectly.
I work in healthcare IT as well, but I think this is untrue. There are a huge host of tools available to effectively administer a large scale complex environment that is entirely Linux. The largest EMR app out there (Epic) works entirely on Linux and usually requires users to jump through hoops with Citrix or similar to get it to run in Windows. Users can be managed with LDAP, authentication can be done with Radius, Linux based DNS and DHCP daemons can easily replace their Windows / Active Directory counterparts. Onlyoffice or LibreOffice can work for an office suite, assuming you still need one in 2023 and you aren't already just using the web versions of O365 or Google (of which Linux has application containers for).
For health care specifically, Linux typically provides easier server-side redundancies / clustering and better patching which means less downtime or shorter maintenance windows. Having a device running medical equipment that could unexpectedly restart in the middle of the night for an unplanned Windows Update (even though your GPO and WSUS tells it not to) would introduce a lot of unneeded stress. I will concede that the biggest issue presently would be driver availability for all of the myriad of special equipment that's unique to the medical field not being available in Linux. However, if enough people switched to Linux that problem would eventually self correct.
Presently at least, Microsoft is cheaper overall and easier to manage with most things being consolidated into AD and a few extra tools. Most sysadmins don't know how to effectively manage a similar non-Windows environment. There would need to be massive retraining in the sysadmin side of the house (WAY more than the user side) to iron out those "issues with effective administration".
It sounds like you guys may be falling behind regarding Epic offerings. We've been using Epic as our major EMR for all of the years that I have been at my present employer, and it has never been an issue delivering it to Windows. There has always been standalone Windows desktops that use native fat clients - for all of the various Epic apps, in fact, not just Hyperspace. It was trivial using Citrix (which we phased out years ago), one can use the web-based client Hyperdrive, and we're now largely using VMware RDSH - which makes things extremely easy and scalable. Again, all of their apps, not just the EMR. They work with us so much to insure integration that honestly Epic-related work is probably some of the easiest, mostly automated things I deal with day-in and day-out.
Yea, I'm aware of all of the possible infrastructure replacements for Microsoft services. For example, we already have to utilize various directories given our size and the need to support so many applications and such a congested interface engine.
I certainly wouldn't want to try making a predominantly Linux environment secure enough to satisfy all of the HIPAA and HIPAA-adjacent rules and regulations. And since most applications used within the industry are written for Windows and meant to interact specifically with Microsoft services, interface engine and other compatibility problems would be something that would take a lot on in-house fixes / solutions, or having to end up using some RDS to deliver Windows desktops to Linux clients anyways, kind of defeating the whole purpose of going Linux.
Since I am infra, I am partially responsible for patching thousands of servers on-prem and cloud, and tens of thousands of devices. We use a comprehensive and cheap third-party patching app. For our Azure WVD environment it's as simple as setting up a management account and using it to patch workstation groups or even just entire collections of subscriptions at once. No server or workstation is ever patched or restarted accidentally. We write our own scripts that mostly leverage WinRM to double check devices and servers in daily reports that lets us know if a server or something failed to patch (CBS issues, store corruption, patch module issue, it just being offlined for whatever reason, etc). Managing GPO's correctly has never been an issue, that's pretty amateur. This is another really easy part of my job, despite our environment being so large.
I'm not sure what you're referring to when mentioning a lack of redundancy or poor clustering? That's never been a problem for me, in any environment using Windows, even excluding solutions that are designed to work with Windows in order to make it more easily available and accessible. I haven't been in the Linux admin game aside from some security devices, SAN devices, and load-balancing devices in years, but I don't recall any kind of Linux clustering solutions being any better or worse than what one can do with Windows Server.
And maybe our Linux/Unix team isn't that great (I basically never have to interact with them unless it's to address some infrastucture issue), but they seem to have to jump through hoops in our various on-prem VMware environments as well as Azure to get their clusters to work in a stable manner. Like, the guests need to run on dedicated hosts, it has to use direct mappings for storage, live migration of data seems iffy, so on and so forth, to where it kind of feels to me that it's a bigger hassle to cluster than just running seperate database servers. I wouldn't want to deal with that kind of headache. We can move / migrate our Windows database cluster nodes and even their storage whenever we like. Restart one node whenever we want. We don't need to arrange elaborate maintenance downs when patching one server like the Linux/Unix team does. Hell, some of our database enviornments merely exist serverless in Azure now.
But you know, our environment is very old, and extremely large, so maybe we've just figured out a lot of stuff that smaller environments still have challenges with. And, we of course have the money to simply over-engineer things when needed
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