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There was a guy on reddit a few years ago who started a dental practice with entirely open-source software and his own EHR system. Really interesting stuff, don't think anyone's posted about it here. Can't view his reddit history but he must still be using it, last commit 1 week ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/p5phju/progress_repo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/x2mls1/update_starti...

3 months agoby unleaded

Heath centers pay unreal amounts of money for these kinds of commercial products, but in my experience the health centers themselves have very few technical resources. So the real "value" being delivered by the commercial software providers is often the setup, support, and hand-holding provided to customers who pay the crazy amounts.

I imagine there will be a niche but high-paid market integrating these GNUHealth products with existing commercial systems, and ongoing opportunities in supporting health centers using the software with planning, upgrades, and lots of phone & email support.

3 months agoby leakycap

Here is the link I was looking for. Took me about three clicks to get there so wanted to save you guys the trouble

https://codeberg.org/gnuhealth

3 months agoby mcny

> The easiest way to get MyGNUHealth is by installing the package from your favorite operating system / distribution. Many operating system distributions already ship MyGNUHealth.

I was actually curious to try this out on my phone, since they claim to support mobile devices.

If running a command-line package manager is the easiest way to install this on Android, I don't want to know what harder ways exist.

I find this is quite typical for open source projects. The community still hasn't really, truly adopted mobile. I guess it's because of the need to have some sort of entity be present in the various App Stores? But if it's possible for servers, why is this so rare to have open source projects as app store vendors?

3 months agoby cseleborg

To preface: I would be happy to see open source adoption in healthcare.

This is presented as an open source software project but it should also make a pitch to managers and doctors - the decision-makers. I put "GNU Health" into YouTube and the first few pages of results were very old and mostly amateur screencasts showing installation while one was an animated presentation with an awful robo voice. I should add none were official videos from the project team.

Then on the official site it says there's a laboratory information management component, but that is not apparent on the documentation page. This is not reassuring if I'm tasked with evaluating for potential adoption.

Next I tried looking up how the Jamaican Health Ministry is using it. The page seems to be over 10 years old: https://www.moh.gov.jm/technical-services-division/health-in... but again this is not under the control of the project team. The main team should help successful users write up their projects (the one page version) and then link to those write ups.

3 months agoby harvey9

This is really cool to see. I've been on the lookout for software like this ever since reading "Why Doctor's Hate Their Computers" in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha....

HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24336039

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381969

I wonder how feasible it would be to replace the current software in practice?

3 months agoby barbs

Nice to see support for Open source. I have seen selling of healthcare data, including medicare and medicaid data to private companies which sliced and diced it and sold to academic and drug research institutions via data marts. ETL jobs would run for months. The data included prescriptions, scans, visits, employee plans etc, for about ~200 millions of American patients. It is anonymized data, but still I always wondered why this was allowed.

3 months agoby zkmon

That federation piece is super interesting. I'm actually giving a talk in Sweden this week about machine learning/AI training in the age of data sovereignty, and my suggestion was two-fold - better and more widespread adoption of things like Homomorphic Encryption and more federated systems that can distribute access and data in sovereign systems. This is a pretty important evolution in that direction!

3 months agoby kristopherleads

I work in a lab which researches regenerative medicine and people often talk about how we are saving lives.

But at the end of the day, it’s not what we are doing that is pushing the needle, its projects like this make existing healthcare accessible for everybody. I want to get a PhD in something related to this at some point. You guys are so insanely cool.

3 months agoby mirawelner

So I couldn't find this on their site and too little time to trawl through their events page. Is this being used in production anywhere?

3 months agoby commandersaki

No offence but GNU is not an organisation I would associate with health, usability and practical software. Noble effort no doubt. Misguided perhaps.

3 months agoby IshKebab

Text is too dark for my old eyes.

3 months agoby phkahler

crazy to think that with this you could run the better part of a hospital with...

3 months agoby gigatexal

I can't quite understand what is actually part of GNU Health:

> Social Medicine and Public Health

> Bioinformatics and Medical Genetics

Are these that a piece of software? scopes? Intents?

> Hospital Management (HMIS)

Ok, now this is software for sure, but what exactly does this mean? There are many things to manage within a hospital. Is this software for managing inventories? Scheduling? Personnel assignments and organizational relations? Patient flow records? And - is most of this stuff really specific to hospitals? e.g. how is this different from managing, say, a hotel?

> Laboratory Management (Occhiolino)

Again not so clear what kind of management we're talking about.

> Personal Health Record (MyGNUHealth)

Ok, this I (think I) understand.

> GNU Health embedded on Single Board devices

What exactly needs to get embedded? And - what kind of device? It could be a Raspberry Pi, that's a single-board device, right? So, just another general-purpose computer, but on ARM-based silicon. Or - it could be an, I don't know, some kind of scanner, like a portable UltraSound.

Bottom line: I'm sure it's a collection of useful software but very difficult to figure out exactly what, and how it's specific to healthcare.

3 months agoby einpoklum