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10 responses to "Top 10 Open Source Medical Billing and Electronic Medical Records Applications"

1. # Alex commented on January 23rd, 2009:

   Our team is working on another open source EMR called elementalClinic. It’s focused on mental health.

   We currently have about 150 clinicians who are using our software every day. These are our paying customers. I’m not quite sure how many clinicians we have when you include people who have just downloaded the package off our website but I’d put the number under 500.

   So not that much but we’re growing quickly and I firmly believe that open source EMR’s are going to be the future.

2. # Alex commented on January 23rd, 2009:

   Oh.. and to answer “why aren’t these CCHIT certified”. Our company actually writes testing tools that CCHIT uses during their certification process so we have a firm grasp of what’s required. At this point, it’s just not something our customers have been asking for so we haven’t dedicated resources to it.

3. # EMR and HIPAA commented on January 23rd, 2009:

   Alex,
   Thanks for the comments. elementalClinic looks like a great project. I think you might have found the right way to build an open source EMR. 150 paying customers (clinicians) is a strong foundation for developing an open source EMR. Then, those 150 clinicians can benefit from a paid development crew along with those who will contribute code to the open source project.

   Thanks for opening up this new perspective on EMR open source projects.

   As far as the CCHIT question, I was being very sarcastic. The cool part is that your answer describes exactly why CCHIT is a waste of money. No provider really wants CCHIT, because it doesn’t certify if the EMR is usable or not. It only tests features. People who rely on CCHIT don’t understand what CCHIT is even about. They’re just fishing for a way to save them time searching for an EMR, but I digress.

   I’d LOVE to hear more about your experience with CCHIT and the testing tools you’ve written to help CCHIT. As you can tell right now I’m quite biased to the expensive and ineffective process. Maybe you can help me to see another angle on why CCHIT is worthwhile.

4. # Bob Berman commented on April 1st, 2009:

   Very interesting. I have recently retired from Family Practice and have been looking at Open Source EMR, mostly at the request of some other docs who know I have the time for this stuff now. I have an IT degree, as well as an MD, so I suppose they want to put me to work again. Anyway, the Wikipedia has a nice web page with a list of open source health care software which is very extensive, it may take awhile to go thru this, but as is usual for the Wikipedia, the information is amazing. BB
   the link to Wikipedia:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_healthcare_software

5. # John commented on April 1st, 2009:

   Thanks for stopping by Bob. Thanks for the link. I’m going to have to look at that and see what I can incorporate into my targeted EHR and EMR open source wiki list.

   Sounds like you do have a good background and we can definitely use more smart people working on these projects. Maybe you should start a blog and write about it. Or I’d welcome a guest post on this blog if you have something interesting to say.

6. # The Right Open Source (Free) EMR Model | EMR (EHR) and HIPAA pingbacked on June 13th, 2009:

   [...] a recent comment on EMR and HIPAA, Alex said that elementalClinic has 150 paying customers that are using the software with somewhere [...]

7. # Juan Suero commented on June 18th, 2009:

   I would like to talk to Bob Berman to see if he can be a mentor to me and I do all the work around helping doctors move to EHR and integrate with existing systems and process. Im new to health care I.T. but been consulting in integration space on the Microsoft platform for 10 years in other industries.

8. # Penny commented on September 10th, 2009:

   Great information its been very helpful and useful in every way.

9. # Sam Bowen commented on December 13th, 2009:

   Hi,

   I am the president of Open Source Medical Software, a non-profit that supports open source medical software. We mostly have been concentrating our efforts on OEMR (OpenEMR) and have mounted a full effort with about 30 professional developers to finish Meaningful Use and CCHIT certification. The main reason that almost no open source projects get certified is that the certification takes a lot od money. The average cost for a fortune 500 company is $200,000+. Who many open source projects can come up with that kind of cash? The application fee is $35,000 but the main costs are making sure that you can pass all those criteria and scripts (in 2008 this was 473). Hopefully the concentration of HHS on Meaningful Use will help this process.

   We have at least 500 physician users in the United States and about that much world wide. OpenEMR is translated into Spanish, Dutch, Greek, Portugese, Bahasa Indonesian, and Swedish. It has built in practice management and has hooks into Relay Health for e-prescribing. And yes it is free and released under the General GPL. We expect these numbers to jump up a lot when we meet Meaningful Use certification in the first part of 2010.

   Sam Bowen, MD
   Open Source Medical Software

10. # John commented on December 13th, 2009:

    Sam,
    Very interesting stuff. I’m glad to see the open source EMR movement moving along so well and with strong backing. It is just very unfortunate that so much money has to be wasted on useless features based upon doctors having poor information about things like certification. I feel for you though, since the perception is out there and VERY real.

    Like you said, I’m hopeful that the new HHS EHR certification criteria will help users to worry less about even more onerous certification processes.