Adoption of FOSS in health care seems to be spreading more and more. Still it is hard to catch sight of some concrete numbers, giving a detailed insight into the actual utilization of FOSS applications in health care.
On the 4th of December the AMIA Open Source Working Group (OS-WG) has released a white paper examining the benefits of FOSS in health care. It is titled “Free and Open Source Software in Healthcare 1.0” and freely available for download. The main author is Ignacio Valdes (chairman of the AMIA OS-WG) who is also the admin of LinuxMedNews.
Beside some general information about the pros and cons, licenses and some EHR/EMR projects, it comes with quite precise statistics about the usage of FOSS in health care. Although those numbers were gathered only for the U.S..
The paper states the number of patients entered in FOSS EHR/EMR and the number of sites using FOSS EHR/EMR systems (in the U.S.) as following:
| Type of institution | Patient records in deployed systems | Number of sites |
|---|---|---|
| Non-federal government | 3,959,065 | 898 |
| Federal government | 28,401,065 | 2505 |
For more details please refer to the actual white paper that is absolutely worth reading!