Difference between revisions of "Free and Open Source EMRs"

Revision as of 13:39, 12 September 2011

Free (Libre) and Open Source Software is the combined ideology of two software development camps. The first, is the Free Software Movement. The Free Software Foundation believes that software licenses should not be used to control people in inappropriate ways. (They use the word "free" as in freedom, not "free" as in no cost). The UK acronym is FLOSS.

The Open Source movement is a group that believes that software is best developed in an open collaborative manner but that some of the politics and philosophy around the Free Software Foundation offered leverage to proprietary software producers to give misleading impressions of FLOSS. All Libre software is Open Source, but not all Open Source Software complies with the FSF licences making it Libre. The essential element is Copyleft.

The coiners of the Open Source title are prominent in Open Source Initiave, a group that evaluates software licenses for compatibility with this collaborative development.

The two groups often collaborate, the most popular FLOSS license is the Gnu General Public License (GPL) which was developed by the Free Software Foundation.

GPLMedicine.org advocates the exclusive use of the GPL in Electronic Medical Record Systems (EMR)

LinuxMedNews.com is the community blog of the Free and Open Source Medical Software Community. Any news regarding the Free and Open Source Medical Software community usually appears first there or on the OpenHealth mailing list. The community is beginning to gain traction withing the Medical Informatics community especially after the creation of the AMIA Open Source Working Group

So far there are several very important medical/clinical implementation projects within the Free and Open Source space.

MirrorMed - EHR and Practice Management System

FreeMED - EHR and Practice Management System

openEMed - distributed healthcare information service components built around the OMG distributed object specifications and the HL7 (and other) data standards; in Java.

OpenEMR - EHR and Practice Management System

OpenMRS - OpenMRS enables design of a customized medical records system with no programming knowledge

PatientOS - PatientOS is an EHR with a rich client, user friendly tools and extensive customization support.

FreeB - Medical Billing Engine

Vista Office - Soon to be released CMS sponsered EHR and Practice Management System

WorldVista - EHR and Hospital Management System

One EMR that is gratuit but not Open Source is VersaForm EMR Basic Edition. It is available by download at VersaForm and is supported by the publisher.

The openEHR Foundation is a non-profit organisation that publishes standard specifications for a new generation of EHR/EMR systems, driven by archetypes and templates. The foundation also supports open source development of openEHR components in various languages, all released under the Mozilla tri-license. openEHR specifications are being used in the Australian national e-Health programme, and its archetype specification is part 2 of the CEN European Standard EN13606 (revised). openEHR is being used in dozens of universities around the world.

The Eclipse Foundation Open Healthcare Framework - This project addresses part of an need to improve the levels of interoperability between applications and systems within and across healthcare organizations – corporate and regions. The project will implement extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for implementations of key health informatics standards based component and support the objectives of many government health departments to encourage the use of interoperable open source infrastructure to lower integration barriers. The frameworks, components and tools created by this project will be used by vendors and integrators to build workstation applications, gateways and server applications in healthcare infrastructures.