Are you a practice, clinic or any other health care institution that is using medical open source software in daily routine? And wasn’t it quite hard for you to find the right software, to get it up and running and to finally customize it to your needs without having any experienced users or reference sites at hand?

Even a high number of downloads or a strong ‘activity percentile’ of an open source software project doesn’t tell you anything about the suitability for your purposes and in general about the stability and efficiency that are required for successful clinical practice.

But what if you could see on a per-project basis at which site it is already deployed and even whom you could contact and ask for advice and personal experiences?
This is where medfloss.org (formerly medfoss.apfelkraut.org) wants to help out. Medfloss.org is mainly an open content platform in which everyone is invited to participate. Beside a comprehensive and structured listing of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects for health care, it now offers also the possibility to submit reference sites that are using a specific project in a productive environment.

So if you are already a medical FLOSS veteran and are open to share your experiences, please take a look at the subsequent steps. You could thereby make life much easier for the ones who want to follow your example.

• You can add your institution as reference site and just provide your site name and homepage. Thereby potential users can leave a comment at your entry and ask for help.While creating your entry you can immediately hook it up with the project(s) you are using. Probably the project(s) should be already in the database, otherwise you are welcome to add them.
• If you are open for people seeking assistance to contact you directly, feel free to add also your contact details. Your email address is protected by SpamSpan against spam bots, but please be aware of that your contact information will be visible to every visitor at medfloss.org.
• How to add your site:
  • First make sure that the project(s) you are using is/are already listed at medfloss.org. The easiest way to do so would be to use the search functionality that you can find on top of the left navigation pane. If it is not yet in the database, please add it by using the link ‘Submit project’.
  • Second just go to the ‘Bazaar’ (http://www.medfloss.org/node/285) and add your institution as reference site. The referring link ‘Add reference site’ is given in the second part of ‘HAVES – professional service providers & reference sites’.
  • Alternatively you could just send me your site information via the contact form and I will add it asap to medfloss.org.

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