[Informaticopia] Open Source Software in Health Informatics

[Nursing Informatics News]

Hi I have just joined Informaticopia
I work for www.openforumeurope.org where our mission is to facilitate open competitive choice in the IT market place by encouraging the production and use of open, competitive software products and solutions.
We are having some success in influencing EC and UK government policies in favour of Open Source and Open Standards, in the UK particularly in education where pioneering schools are saving between £40 and £80k pa. and in Local Government where we are a partner in www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk .
We would like to have a go at health in the UK where the IT budgets seem to be extraordinarily high and not achieving much but committed to existing suppliers like IDX and iSoft on Microsoft platforms.
I have joined your blog to put forward some ideas, get some responses, understand the issues so we can work on facilitating appropriate solutions probably involving the use of some open source software along side proprietary systems - what we call the mixed software economy.
Re medical records, which is at the core of IT health, there is an open source solution in USA currently managing 44m records - see OpenEMR www.OpenEMR.net wpennington @ pennfirm.com 2004-03-03. This has been deployed in Dublin.
There is another system in Europe, which is under development see http://www.care2x.com a European OS ERM system.
If you are not already a knowing user of Open Source you might like to read a web book http://freedomsoftware.info/ by Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, a doctor who has got involved in IT and is good at explaining technology.


Comments welcomed
Stephen

open source

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