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 can enhance the functionality of each system concurrently. While there is no one panacea for the trials ahead, Drupal is highly capable of rising to meet many of the existing and future challenges the industry has to offer.

In the whitepaper they mention open source success stories like Pfizer, Florida Hospitals, Amerigroup Health Services, and Alliance Imaging. I think we’ll continue to hear of more and more open source success stories in healthcare for the reasons outlined in the whitepaper Harnessing Open Source Technology to Drive Outcomes in Healthcare. It takes a bit of a different mentality to go the open source route, but those who do are usually very satisfied. I think healthcare IT could really benefit from this shift in mentality.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • I didn’t read the white paper as…I find it a hassle to get to it….
    But, I’m all for open source, though if open source is done, it seems it should be done at the EHR level first, like with VistA.
    The big thing this would do is standard…truly standardize the data.
    I used drupal for many years and thought it is a solid CMS, but dealing with that “community” was a miserable experience.
    I was thrilled to leave for the WordPress world.

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