Open source healthcare is forging forward quickly on the Internet. But, fast developments often produce many failures. But, many medicinal open source projects that have gained success development. This success shows that open source alone is not the solitary factor in development. Instead, look to great management, public relations, marketing and a sound program that stands up under the scrutiny of a growing number of peer users and, often, patients.
To limit this list to 50 projects means that we’ve tapped only the tip of the mountain of open source projects available to the healthcare industry. They encompass every subject from ultrasound technician education to national health care database privacy. The following list is categorized alphabetically, and each link under every category is arranged alphabetically as well. We use this methodology to show that we do not favor one resource over another.
Ambulatory Care
- ClearHealth: Medical software designed by clinics and hospitals and powered by Open Source software. ClearHealth includes modules for document storage, customizable reporting/forms, lab results and prescription management.
- EGADSS: EGADSS is an open source tool that is designed to work in conjunction with primary care Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems to provide patient specific point of care reminders in order to aid physicians provide high quality care.
- GNUmed: Use this free/open source software, released under the GNU Public license to andle your patient’s records.
- IndivoHealth: Indivo is a personally controlled health record system that enables patients to own complete, secure copies of their medical records.
- OpenEHR: In the clinical space, it is about creating high-quality, re-usable clinical models of content and process – known as archetypes – along with formal interfaces to terminology. OpenEHR could take you there.
- OpenEMR: OpenEMR is a free medical practice management, electronic medical records, prescription writing, and medical billing application.
- OpenMRS: OpenMRS is a community-developed, open-source, enterprise electronic medical record system framework.
- Tolven: An opportunity to use electronic Clinician Health Record (eCHR) and electronic Personal Health Record (ePHR) systems.
- Ultimate EMR: Ultimate EMR was designed as a Commercial Open Source application rich in features and that can be combined with many other products and tools.
- WorldVista EHR: WorldVistA EHR is an open source electronic health record based on the highly acclaimed VistA system of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Collaboration
- GNU Projects: The Free Software Foundation provides a variety of free and open source software and publishes a list of various open source licenses and comparative features.
- Medsphere: Medsphere.org is a community gathering place where healthcare administrators, clinicians, developers and enthusiasts can interact, share, and collaborate.
- Open Health: This Yahoo! Group focuses on discussion of FOSS health I.T.-related topics.
- Open Source Health Informatics Working Group: IMIA OSWG brings together experts and interested individuals from a wide range of health professions and with a range of interests in the potential application of free/libre and open source solutions within their domains of expertise.
- OS-WG: The mission of the OS-WG (Open Source Working Group) is to act as the primary conduit between the broader open source community and AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association).
- OSHCA: OSHCA’s membership comprises a community of people, civil societies and professional bodies in health care and informatics industries that promotes the Free/Open Source Software Concepts in Health Care.
Integration
- Gello: ANSI-accredited HL7 standard for creating computable, unambiguous clinical queries.
- i2b2: i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) is an NIH-funded National Center for Biomedical Computing based at Partners HealthCare System. Their work is designed to facilitate the design of targeted therapies for individual patients with diseases having genetic origins.
- IHE Open Source: This project holds an implementation of the Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) profile as defined by IHE (ihe.net).
- Mirth: Mirth is an open source cross-platform HL7 interface engine that has established itself as the baseline for healthcare information exchange. Mirth allows messages to be filtered, transformed, and routed based on user-defined rules.
- Records for Living: OpenHealth services allow for a wide variety of safe, secure reports and services to be delivered to consumers, leveraging the power of their electronic medical records.
Imaging/Visualization
- BrainStorm: BrainStorm is an integrated free Matlab toolkit dedicated to Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and Electroencephalography (EEG) data visualization and processing.
- Medical Exploration Toolkit: Advanced two- and three-dimensional visualizations with easy application building and efficient case management.
- MicroDicom: MicroDicom is application for primary processing and preservation of medical images in DICOM format.
- O3-RWS: O3-RWS is the Radiology Workstation of the Open Three (O3) Consortium. O3-RWS is an Open Source, IHE based, Internationalized, Modular and Portable Image Display.
- SMIViewer: A free (soon to be open source) DICOM volume analyzer for research/teaching on Windows.
Medical Practice Management Software
- CARE2X: Care2x integrates data, functions and workflows in a healthcare environment.
- iHRIS Suite: Open source HRIS solutions, distributed under the GPL, to supply health sector leaders and managers with the information they need to assess HR problems, plan effective interventions and evaluate those interventions.
- MirrorMed: MirrorMed is a free and open source EHR and practice management system written in PHP. This is a Web-based application that is capable of running a healthcare practice.
- OpenDental: Previously known as Free Dental, OpenDental is an open source Practice Management Software licensed under the GNU General Public License.
- OpenTAPAS: Technology Assisted Practice Application Suite (TAPAS) is a model to assist primary care physicians use technology in a targeted manner in their practices. It is an open source (GPL 2.0) collection of tools.
Online Publications
- PLos Medicine: A peer-reviewed open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science.
- LinuxMedNews: This is your site for Linux, Free and Open Source medical software news, and has been since March 2000.
Programs
- Debian Med: The goal of Debian Med is a complete system for all tasks in medical care which is built completely on free software.
- Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) Project: The project is composed of extensible frameworks and tools which emphasize the use of existing and emerging standards in order to encourage interoperable open source infrastructure, thereby lowering integration barriers in healthcare informatics technology.
- NHS: A UK NHS Interface (CUI), program guidance and product library available to NHS users and service providers using N3.
- ODIN: ODIN is a C++ software framework to develop, simulate and run magnetic resonance sequences on different platforms.
- Open Three (O3) Consortium: An innovative open-source project dealing with the multi-centric integration of hospitals, RHIOs and citizen (care at home and on the move, and ambient assisted living), based on the about 60 HECE bilateral cooperation Agreements with healthcare facilities. Use their imaging, collaboration and other software.
- OpenGalen: Their goal is to promote healthcare through stimulating the use and development of GALEN experience and technology as a basis for teaching, training and services in the area of medical terminology, language, knowledge and information and in anything directly or indirectly related in the widest sense.
Public Health and Biosurvellance
- EpiSPIDER: This experimental map is generated from news reports from both expert-curated and general news sources on epidemics.
- Influism: To be used for pandemic preparedness planning by health care offices, this download computes the effect of interventions like antiviral treatment of cases and social distancing.
- OpenEMed: Biosurveillance and clinical data repository based on Web services and modules. Offers solid interoperability and federation of clinical data.
- RODS: “Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance” (RODS) is an open-source public health surveillance software.
- Sispread: This open source tool was created to help people concerned by public health to easily perform epidemic simulations and to analyze their results.
Software
- ATP III Cholesterol Management: This interactive guideline tool will assist the clinician in implementing the ATP III Cholesterol Guidelines at the point of care on a Palm OS.
- BMI Calculator : This calculator runs on any device running the Palm Operating System (Palm OS) and PocketPC 2003.
- Heart Attack Signs: This Palm OS program provides physicians and other health care providers talking points for discussing heart attack warning signs and survival steps with patients.
- IPath : iPath is an open source platform for telemedicine applications such as consultations, case discussions, virtual staff meetings and more.
- MedMapper: Medical decision making algorithm tool. Visual design tool generates Tcl/Tk code. Non-programmers can design interactive algorithms. Generates notes for inclusion in medical record.
- Zephyropen : Open source SDK for health monitoring devices and downloads for OSX, PC and cell phones.
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Thank you for posting this list! A wealth of resources to explore, many of which are new to me. It will be interesting to watch how this space evolves and who bubbles up to the top – a kind of crowdsourcing to decide which open source projects actually do change medicine.
Alexandra Carmichael
Co-Founder, CureTogether
How about http://ourmed.org
Ourmed will improve healthcare around the world with accessible and clean information in an age when government, non profit, and private healthcare systems face serious financial strain. Patients, doctors, pharmacists, nurses, other clinicians, and caregivers must have accurate, timely and relevant information about products, services, and even information itself. Ourmed.org volunteers are committed to improving the quality of the global healthcare system through sharing their learned expertise and their personal experiences.
Thank you for posting
http://chileforge.cl/projects/osiris/
http://www.sistemahospitalario.blogspot.com/
Hospital Systems OSIRIS for mono an GTK# and postgresql
GNU? That is an entity, not an “Open Source Projects”. You might as well list Redhat, SUN, Novell, and all other companies that have written any open source code, right? Don’t forget OpenOffice. See…I was hoping this article would like key tools or applications supporting the medical industry, and instead it seems padded with irrelevant stuff.
This is a very useful posting. So many options to choose. But I don’t see District Health Infromation System (DHIS). It has done so well in most of the sub-sahara African countries together with Asia and Latin America
If there had been a “research” category, it might have included R (http://www.r-project.org), an Open Source statistical analysis platform and increasingly the standard statistical programming language across many disciplines.
PLoS Medicine is an open access publisher, but doesn’t make its software open source, as far as I know. Why don’t you list open access publishers who were pioneers in the open access arena AND contributed their manuscript management system code as open source? E.g. the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), reviewed here. To my knowledge, all the XML functionality of the OJS publishing system, supporting the NLM-DTD, as well as open source tools to convert word documents into NLM-DTD style XML, which is now also used by other medical open access journals, has been originally developed by the JMIR team. PLoS Medicine was good in self-promotion, but was neither the first open access publisher nor contributed anything it does as open source.
another imporant and frightening..web site is a data base from patient comments..
http://www.askapatient.com
Another open source healthcare project in the integration category is the Open eHealth Integration Platform (IPF). It extends Apache Camel with healthcare-related features such as a domain-specific language for HL7 message processing and integration components for implementing IHE actor interfaces . See also this introductory article for details.
The NHS CUI project is very worthwhile, but it’s not really open source, being funded by Microsoft.
Great list. Many thanks for putting it together. It would be valuable to have a category added for open hardware projects, such as our work at the University of Wisconsin to build a very low cost, open source spirometer (http://bit.ly/eCqwq).
This is a great list.
Do y’all know about Open Mobile Health Exchange (OMHE)? Its an open source micro-format for sending simple medical info such as blood pressure.
Its for use with services like Twitter and SMS, and also provides a format for medical device output.
Wow, thanks for compiling the great list. Open source is more and more important in our life.
Very very useful post indeed, a lot of these are very interesting! Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you also for including Mirth on there, Mirth is an integration engine for communication standards and protocols like HL7, XML, DICOM etc, but its now known as MirthConnect. More info found here instead of the older mirthproject.org website.
Great list, I wonder if there are any that are only pseudo open source and not 100% open source.
If any of them cater to proprietary data formats, proprietary software and not open data formats than they are falsely advertising that they are open source when they are not; thus pseudo open source.
Let’s call it like it is, their are software applications available right now, today that will let 100% of users see the web content on your website, regardless of the operating system (OS) on the computer or the browser being used. Do you use them? Do you recommend them?
If I am using a Mac, Unix or Linux for my OS and not using Internet Explorer as my browser, can I see your content without Adobe or Microsoft applications? Why not?
If I do not want to enable Java and/or JavaScript can I still view your website? If not there are plenty of other options where I can go for my content.
Do you require software and/or data formats covered under a software or hardware patent in order to see your content? If so then you are NOT supporting open source and open data formats.
Does your install process require proprietary software covered under proprietary patents? Does your install process require a person to update a proprietary OS? Both scenarios are FAILS!
Let’s make the web 100% viewable by everyone, regardless of which OS or browser they prefer! That is the best way and is fair to everyone, even the proprietary companies that will not return the favor.
Who is being a better net citizen?
Great, it’s a really good idea compiling this. Thanks you for share it. There are a lot of nice projects growing up on health care.
Take a look on Medical: “Objective
rovide an universal Electronic Medical Record (EMR), so doctors and institutions all over the world, independently of their economic status, will benefit from a centralized, high quality, secure and scalable system.”
Open Source : Licensed under GPL v3
http://medical.sourceforge.net/
Another one is http://www.biomobius.com , which is an open shareable technology platform, which allows researcher to rapidly develop sophisticated technology solutions for biomedical research.
Which of these, if any, is for pharmacies / e-prescription ?
I am an ob/gyn with extensive experience and work in ambulatory EHR projects in the U.S. (four years in Department of Defense/U.S. Military Health System and 7 years in private sector with WebMD Practice Services now owned by Sage Software). I was pleasantly surprised to find this lis that referenced in the #2 spot an open source Clinical Decision Support Solution that brought computable guidelines into an EHR.” This is a challenging area–to get even the most authoritative guidelines into the EHR’s Health Management module. I am a volunteer member of the U.S. Certification Commission of Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT). My comments here though are my own and don’t represent CCHIT in any way. One thing I can say: the commission is interested in “successful” open source components or add-on modules to EHR systems.
THE PROBLEM HERE IS THAT IT SEEMS EGADSS WAS NEVER SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTED EVEN AT THE FAMILY PRACTICE THAT PROMOTED IT (McMasters University Department of Family Medicine). There is no mention of it in the 2007 to 2008 McMasters Family Medicine report, nor can I find any evidence that ANY healthcare organization is using it. Perhaps someone could enlighten me on this.
The last trace of EGADSS that I can find is in 2007 about some update to the code.
BOTTOM LINE QUESTION: Is there any real world implementation of EGADSS where it is being used as a regular part of a clinician’s workflow?
Another question: Is it currently supported by any individual or organization that is continuing its maturation as more healthcare IT standards emerge? If the answers to the above questions is NO,, then putting EGADSS on the list as “successful” makes one wonder as to the credibility of some of the other references.
James OConnor MD
I think OsiriX is one of the most successful Open Source Projects which already has changed medicine.
http://www.osirix-viewer.com
Thanks for the post, which I just found through Michael Bauwens’ repost on open hardware in healthcare. His point was that there was no hardware in the list. It may be that none of the hardware projects made the cut because they’re very early, and are not yet successful, by some measure (note previous post).
Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out a few that didn’t make the cut: David Van Sickle’s open spirometer project for respitory diseases, my own Open Prosthetics Project (which includes an open electronic hardware effort), and the Open EEG Project, to name a few.
I think that David is right. We do need to develop a repository or commons where effort and information on these things can be centralized. At a recent Open Hardware Conference I attended, we discussed exactly that, but the efforts are still in the planning stages. It is only through success in organizing these efforts and encouraging the activation effort required to get past the potential barrier (to use a chemistry metaphor), that we can move these projects from the theoretical/hype to the practical/successful column. For some patient populations, this may be the only way that real change and progress begins to occur.