Committed to the Open Source Movement in Healthcare
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16 October 1998
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Health informatics Europe
| updated: 15 August 2001 | |
GNUMed developments
By Adrian Midgley Australian GPs have had two main suppliers of computerised medical record and administration systems for some years. HCN has recently bought their competitor. The charges for Medical Director - the HCN program - have hitherto been low by UK standards partly because advertising space sold on the doctors' desktops defrays costs. There is some anxiety among Australian GPs that the reduction in competition may reduce innovation in the future, and that the supplier may no longer need to be responsive to users' wishes. Dr Horst Herb has been running the GNUMed project for some time now, and the software - an Open Source GP system of considerable depth and complexity of design - is approaching release. Discussion of GNUMed on the international OpenHealth mailing list has allowed a free exchange of ideas with some very high-powered theoretical work from the GEHR (Good European, later Good Electronic Health Record) project which started in London and has moved focus to Australia, and simple practicalities from UK, French and Californian GPs and other system developers. GNUMed uses the well-known stable and mature Linux operating system, delivers information to graphical user interface using the X11-Windowing system - one of the three main GUIs to develop from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center work, along with the Macintosh and MS Windows - and is written in Python and C. GNUMed will ensure there is some alternative to closed-source commercially held software for Australian GPs, and incidentally moves forward the development of medical records software for the entire world another small step. GNUMed: www.gnumed.org/
In September the NHSIA-sponsored OSHCA 2
meeting follows MedInfo in Kensington. Open Source Healthcare Alliance: www.oshca.org
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