Upgrades in open source are necessity not a luxury also mainly they are free not commercial as many commercial enterprise solutions do, as the feedback cycle is active from the supported community and as there is active users there are upgrades released to empower the solution. However, local support from local developers are much appreciated which is hard to find. Open-source solutions are often packed by a powerful community of developers and advanced users as we mention before, so they provide active feedback for the core developers usually to improve the system with new feature and maintain it.
Implementation is not easy even for Proprietary commercial solutions, however as the commercial one has teamed to implement, the most successful open source HIS solution has powerful community worldwide to implement thanks to rich powerful documentation provided by the core developers, any developer with primary knowledge of the development stack and production environment can install it easily. Challenges and concerns in open source HIS Especially patients records and lab records in secure form. "System without backup is unusable system", It takes few seconds with computer glitch or human errors to lose all the data, HIS should provide the necessary tools to back up and maintain the data.
Importing and exporting data is a crucial tool any should have to allow importing data from CSV/ Excel files into the system as well as exporting them for backup purposes as well as to be used or viewed in other software as MS Excel. Reporting is a necessity in HIS, Usable HIS should has a reporting tools supported by visual presentations in down-able usable formats System admins should have access to all events log in their system including user activities, login events, data access etc. The central server should be maintained and secured from access from unauthorized personal as well as protected from illegal activities and access. Most of the solutions are built as Server/ Client-based solution to give the opportunity to access from multiple different devices by multiple users, departments and locations. There are different user groups will access the system as doctors, nurses, employee, managers, laboratory technicians, accountants, secretary every group has its own rules and modules to work on Users permissions should be granted by the system admins. What Hospital Information System should has? However the user can get those services from the community, or buying a developers to customize it's modules on top of the free open source code.
Another misconception about open source it's not totally free, well revenue models of open source solution is quite different than the commercial ones, some of open source provide the solution/ software for free but there is always extra fee for implementation, custom development, configuration and so on. One of the most active roamers about open source solutions and software that it comes without support, however that is not accurate as many open source project/ software are packed by developers and powerful community of advanced users. However it's not just about managing but it's about reporting.įree Open source ( FOSS ) or Proprietary commercial solutions? The main aim is to ease the workflow of the connected and intersected processes that involve different parties. Some open source ERPs (Enterprise resource planning ) started to target hospitals with customized modular applications, but not all of them are equal, you may read about that in our review: 7 Most hospital ready open-source ERP solutions. HIS is basically built to manage everything in the hospital and built for every user with active role in hospital operations as managers, doctors, staff nurses, accountants, pharmacists, lab technicians. HIS stands for Hospital Information System which is integrated solution designed to manage all the hospital's operations including medical operations, clinical workflow, financial, administrative, human resources, documents, legal and inventory. You can save it and return to it as a updated resource.
It will receive continues update about the listed applications. Note: This article is an Evergreen article.