Help Us Decide: Language / Platform For Hospital System

hi i am presently working with a team of programmers, and we are trying to develop a complete management system for an hospital. We are currently still in the data gathering phase and we are trying to decide what languages to use in the development. Our client has briefed us on requirement and with dis we have come up with the following criteria

1. the software to be developed should be web based
2. the software should have a relatively low resell price (thus the we need to reduce to the minimum all licensing fees)
3. it should be fully cross platform
4. it should be able to communicate with standard medical equipments.(ultra scan machines etc)

so far we feel PHP/mySQL and Ajax calls should do but the job but we are having problems with criteria no 4 (basically because php is a server side script and the client side (the browser) is basically xhtml)

Good programming pl of nairaland we need your suggestions on
1. choice of languages to use if u if what we chose wont work
2. or suggestion on how to interface eternal devices with the client web pages

.NET, that means we would have to use IIS, which in turn means we would have to use Microsoft server. I think dis doesn't satisfy the second criteria of it been cross platform.

men ,  use JAVA ,  use your PHP/MYSQL , and AJAX for whole job but when it comes to communicating with those devices ,  then , call JAVA Applets embeded in those HTML interface to com with the device when needed only ,  u are already on the right track solving the problem ,
best of Luck and happy programming !

#4: U can access the serial port using Java; and you can access Java through Javascript. With Javascript in your page, you can figure the rest out.