Tag Archives: Health Care

Freemedsw – Stats and More

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As freemedsw.apfelkraut.org is now online for more than two years (2nd anniversary 2010/01/12), it is again time for a ranking of the most popular Open Source projects for the health care sector.

Meanwhile more than 130 active projects are listed in 21 categories and I still (!) appreciate your help in case you find a broken link, incorrect information or you just have improvement suggestions. Please send me a message or leave a comment. You can submit change requests or new projects via a form which is available here.

Congratulations to the ClearHealth Inc. and its contributors for the popularity of their project ClearHealth!

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Finding Medical FOSS: Freshmeat vs. SourceForge

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I just realized while searching for new or emerging medical open source projects that freshmeat.net looks and works quite differently compared to former times. Seems they launched already in March 2009 their new Freshmeat 3.0 platform.

Freshmeat.net Now tagging is used for indexing the projects while the categories have been thrown overboard. Regarding medical FOSS the project admins seem not to really make use of this feature. Tags similar to hospital information system, PACS, EMR or patient management have never been used or I was just too dumb to find some health care related ones. Only two projects are tagged with “Medical“, the tag “Medical Science” is associated with 146 projects. One and a half year ago the category “Medical Science Apps” contained 139 projects there.

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The Stimulus Bill and Its Impact on FOSS

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WSM: Code Red

Phillip Longman recently wrote an interesting article for the Washington Monthly about Obama’s Stimulus Bill and its impact to the implementation of FOSS in the American health care system.

Titled “Code Red – How software companies could screw up Obama’s health care reform” he gives introductorily a short overview about the drawbacks of the current health care system and the idea behind Obama’s Stimulous Bill aka American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

He subsequently provides detailed insights about Electronic Medical Record (EMR) implementations across the U.S. in which the adoption of FOSS has considerably increased the quality of care and reduced costs in contrast to proprietary EMR solutions.

His actual point is that the bill and the thereby provided money (about $ 20 billion) is about to be restricted only to proprietary EMR software companies in case their lobbying succeeds.

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Barriers to FOSS Adoption in Quebec and elsewhere?

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Quebec

G. Paré et al. published in Februar 2009 an insightful article about the “Barriers to Open Source Software Adoption in Quebec’s Health Care Organizations” (PDF) in the Journal of Medical Systems. Their abstract reads like this:

“We conducted in-depth interviews with 15 CIOs to identify the principal impediments to adoption of open source software in the Quebec health sector. We found that key factors for not adopting an open source solution were closely linked to the orientations of ministry level policy makers and a seeming lack of information on the part of operational level IT managers concerning commercially oriented open source providers. We use the case of recent changes in the structure of Quebec’s health care organizations and a change in the commercial policies of a key vendor to illustrate our conclusions regarding barriers to adoption of open source products.”

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Freemedsw – Most popular projects

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Doctor Tux

As freemedsw.apfelkraut.org is now online for more than a year (anniversary 2008/01/12), it is time for a first ranking of the most popular Open Source projects for the health care sector.

Meanwhile 115 active projects are listed and I still (!) appreciate your help in case you find a broken link, incorrect information or you just have improvement suggestions. Please send me a message or leave a comment at this post. You can submit change requests or new projects via a form which is available here.

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Some numbers about FOSS in health care

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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.

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