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The Answer: Freemed Project and Open Source

One of the most unique and promising projects in the history of medicine is going on right now. No, I’m not talking about the Human Genome Project, I’m talking about Freemed and other Open Source clinical software projects.

Freemed was begun in 1999 with the goal of providing fully capable medical record and office software that is web-enabled and free. It uses the ‘Open Source’ model of software in which the software programs which comprise Freemed are open to all to fix, modify and extend. It is only in its infancy, but has made tremendous strides in its short life. It can be obtained with only a few mouse clicks on the Internet at http://freemed.org

Freemed is tremendously important to medicine. Why? Among the many reasons is that if successful, much of the power that is wielded by large organizations such as insurance companies, government and HMO’s that conspire to make patients, small clinics and individual practitioners comparatively less powerful will be swept away. It will enable massive collaboration among all health care entities so that small and individual practices will have the same powerful software tools for patient care that large organizations have with minimal cost.

It will remove the fragmented, winner-take-all landscape that now exists among medical software vendors as well as end the era in which most packages are incompatible, very expensive and force practitioners to be at the mercy of one vendor.

Freemed will also avoid the 30 year old problem of no one company or product being able to satisfy the enormous engineering effort and functionality required in medical computing.

It can end the high cost of software failures and duplication of engineering effort that ultimately everyone pays for.

It is the only real answer to the problem of medical computing.

Welcome to LinuxMedNews

Contact Linux Medical News at:

ivaldes at hal-pc.org

Welcome to Linux Medical News! The purpose of this site is to facilitate, amplify and begin the process of fundamentally changing medical education and practice into a more effective, fair and humane enterprise using modern technologies. This is a site that can react to fast-breaking news using powerful publishing software that allows anyone to contribute as well as providing forums for discussion.

Too long has medicine followed a rigid heirarchy and either scorned information technology, or gone about it in ways doomed to failure.

This site is different. Technology in all aspects of medicine is embraced and promoted. Particularly Linux and open source software. Radical, free ideas and concrete embodiments of those ideas are (within reason) welcome here as well as a brokerage for practical advice.

Linux Medical News is a collaborative effort, and cannot succeed without you the reader for support and input. You can post your own articles to this site and can engage in discussion of the articles posted. You can also scan the Internet and point out links via a posted article to sites that others may find useful or interesting. Articles are moderated by Saint.

The future is ours, it is time to make the myths.

To be clear about what this site is about:

  • This is a news site about Free and Open Source Software in Medicine.
  • This site is about Free and Open Source Electronic Health Record software.
  • This site is about Free and Open Source EHR software.
  • This site is about Free and Open Source Medical Billing.
  • This site is about Free and Open Source EMR.
  • This site is about Free and Open Source Electronic Medical Record.
  • This site is about Free and Open Source medical Practice Managment software.
  • This site is about Free and Open Source in medicine software projects.
  • This site is about Free and Open Source software projects such as the Veterans Affairs VistA software.
  • This site is about news of the VistA Office EHR VOE effort.
  • This site is about news of the the MirrorMed, OpenEMR, OpenEHR, OpenHRE, ClearHealth and FreeB projects.
  • This site is about news of ONCHIT, Connecting for Health, interoperability, NHIN and HL7.