Run a hospital on Open Source
I remember reading this BBC article (Free Software to Aid Poor Doctors) back in 2003 and still believe that it’s relavant today – especially now that I’m still in Africa trying to spread the FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) gospel.

To be brief and to the point, medical software that runs an entire hospital or a doctor’s office is extremely expensive. We’ve all heard horror stories about patients getting wrong drug prescriptions, etc. Or that a particular hospital is very inefficient due to the lack of a proper Hospital Information System (HIS).

Everybody’s doing it
Well, thanks once again to the spirit of the open source software movement (ie. Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, Compiere, TinyERP, SQL Ledger, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird RDBMS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and much, much more) that’s taking the planet by storm, hospital IT managers can now breathe easily knowing that top-notch medical software exists – for FREE. And this isn’t the crappy software that your grandmother probably used 10 or 20 years ago.

Instead, you’ll find doctors, medical researchers and serious software engineers who take part in these very well funded projects. The beauty of this movement is that key elements such as sharing and community take center stage over profits. Yes, it’s still important to make a profit, but I don’t believe software should be so damn expensive. It’s as though some of these software executives are trying to pay cash for a new, red Ferrari. LOL.

Take Care
Although the article mentions VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture), which was commissioned by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, I still believe that Care2X (see HIS screenshots) is a better alternative since it is completely web-based and has a modern architecture incorporating some very nice wireless features. VistA, I’m told, was written in MUMPS (more info) – an outdated computer language – back in the late 70s. However, interfaces to modern computer languages have been created.

To conclude, if you are a health care practitioner, I strongly reccomend giving a look at VistA or Care2X. Why re-invent the wheel and pay a fortune when your medical buget is probably shrinking faster than our beautiful endangered tiger population?

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Related links:

• VistA in Egypt, an Interview with Omar H. El Hattab
• The History of the Hardhats (how VistA got started)
• VistA adopters worldwide
• World Turning to Software VA shuns
• Care2X HIS online demo
• Care2X Practise Management demo
• OSCAR (An open source web-based electronic patient record system for delivery of evidence resources at the point of care developed by the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Canada by Dr. David Chan, a family physician and an information technology revolutionary)
• OpenEMR (Open Source EMR & Practice Management; get the commercial version from Synitec)
• LinuxMedNews.com (GNU/Linux And Open Source Medical Software News)
• The Debian Linux Medical practice site (free medical applications)