Harnessing Open Source Technology to Drive Outcomes in Healthcare

I’ve long been a fan of open source technologies. My blogs are run and created almost entirely on open source software. In fact, I first wrote about open source EMR on this blog back in January of 2006. We’ve come a long way since then with Vista being the top open source EHR in the hospital world and OpenEMR leading the pack in the ambulatory world. We’re starting to see more and more application of open source technology in other areas of healthcare IT beyond EMR as well. There are some really amazing advantages to a thriving open source community. I think the key there is to have a thriving open source community behind the project. It’s not enough to just say that your software is open source. If you don’t have a great community behind the project, then the open source piece doesn’t do too much for you. With that said, I was really intrigued by this whitepaper from Achieve Health that talks about why they are applying the popular open source Drupal framework to healthcare. While I’ve mostly used WordPress for the things I’ve done, I’ve had a chance to use Drupal for a few projects and I’m really intrigued by the idea of applying the Drupal framework to healthcare. This section of the whitepaper describes their vision really well: Drupal is not a replacement for legacy IT systems from EMRs, Billing, Practice Management etc., but rather an extension to these systems. Through sophisticated integrations Drupal...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Technology Consultants Authors: Tags: Healthcare HealthCare IT Open Source EMR Achieve Health Drupal Drupal in Healthcare Open Source EHR Open Source Healthcare IT OpenEMR Vista Source Type: blogs