PatientOS is a free open source Healthcare Information System designed for hospitals and physician offices worldwide. Version 1.0 is slated for October 31, 2008. PatientOS v0.11 demonstrates database independence by porting from PostgreSQL to an embedded database. The orders interface has been refined to increase navigation speed and usability. Screenshots, video footage and further information can be found here.

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Here is an opinion piece about FOSS and the IHE Connectathon: ‘…This year IBM supported the open source openEMR application participation fees. We will probably not be able to do it next year. I know of open source applications that wish to go to the ’08 Connectathon (openEMR, Mirth, Tolven, MirrorMed, and more are coming). They have lots of motivation that comes with considerable barriers in the shape of travel expenses plus the investment in integration, implementation, and passing the MESA tests. From talks with them I understand that the 8K$ registration fees is something they will not be able to swallow, and I assume that it will prevent them from participating in the event…’

This article states: ‘Written in Java and released under the GPL, iDART (intelligent Dispensing of Antiretroviral Treatment) is a pharmacy system designed for use at antiretroviral (ARV) pharmacies in the public health sector. Initially distributed only as software, it was generally implemented on machines using Windows. Due to issues of reliability and security, Cell-Life have created iDART-in-a-box, which is a complete system running on Ubuntu Linux…’

After five years, I finally managed to put my
ideas into a book, which I would like to
announce to the developers of the medical
software community, because I was greatly
influenced by their discussions. More information about the book can be found here

Many years ago, I started coding on the
http://www.resmedicinae.org
open source project, at that time in Java.

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The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) Ontology has been released under an open source license located here. From the announcement: ‘In response to the increasing demand from the life science and
biomedical informatics communities and the private industry for an anatomy ontology that can empower computer applications in biomedicine and provide a
basic science framework for the integration of biological data from different sources, the University of Washington and the FMA Ontology Research team hereby release the open source license for the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) ontology and grant licensees a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, copyright license to reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, prepare modifications of, and distribute the FMA ontology with or without modifications. For more information on the availability, terms and conditions of the license and on how to access and download the Release version of the FMA ontology please visit the FMA Ontology Research Project site at http://fma.biostr.washington.edu/license…’

Douglas Goldstein and co-author Peter Groen have an article entitled: Understanding Open Solutions and Terminology in Healthcare in Virtual Medical World that compares and contrasts all things that call themselves Open: ‘Having heard so many people recently using the terms “open systems”, “open computing”, and “open source” interchangeably, believing they all mean the same thing, the authors felt it was time to once again get back to basics and write a short article defining some of these terms and pointing out the critical differences between them…’ Another article in the same issue on the future of healthcare predicts that by the year 2020: ‘…The EHRs in use will be interoperable, standards based and many will be Open Solutions that are supported by an international network of companies and community of users and developers, e.g. WorldVistA EHR, OSCAR, OpenEMR…’

We’ve just released a milestone 1.1 version of Mirth, and have just launched our new site at http://www.mirthproject.org. Head over and contribute to the messages boards, wiki, and submit any bugs to our issue tracker. As always, thanks to our users and contributors!

The Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) Project is an open source project whose aim is to build an e-health computing platform (tools, run-times and community) on which developers can more effectively build useful and interoperable applications. We believe that the openEHR community could leverage the Eclipse platform – the tooling, run-time and governance support, to improve the coherence of the the tools, implementations and uptake of openEHR. OHF will propose an openEHR component at the European EclipseCon meeting.
Eclipse is widely known as a tools IDE, or even just a Java development environment. But Eclipse is more than this.

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New Open Source Interface Engine Speeds Health Information Technology Integration and Dramatically Reduces Cost of Achieving Interoperability. Read On for the full announcement.
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., July 18 /PRNewswire/ — WebReach, Inc., a leading healthcare IT consultancy and creator of open source Health IT solutions, today announced the open source release of Mirth 1.0. Mirth delivers the industry’s first free, open source HL7 messaging middleware. The standards-based Mirth software is designed to dramatically reduce the time and cost required to achieve health information system interoperability and data exchange, and to speed secure information sharing across communities of healthcare professionals. Mirth delivers robust HL7 interface capabilities in an open source package, providing an alternative to costly proprietary and in-house systems.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060718/latu080.html?.v=62

Douglas Goldstein and Peter Groen have an informative article with a wide ranging perspective of FOSS in medicine. ‘…It is important to recognize that a wide range of OSS solutions are already in use in health care, generally consisting of technical tools and business applications – Linux, Apache, Open Office, mySQL, FireFox, and other fairly well known products. In addition, there are a large number of health care specific OSS solutions that have also been developed and are being widely deployed, such as OSCAR, FreeMed, MedLine, BLAST, Epi-X, SaTScan, VistA, and many more…’