Free/Open Source Software and Health Care: Benefits and Challenges

Dr. Anu Guptax

Abstract

Health care occupies an important place in every country. Information technology (IT) can play a vital role to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of health care. But there are several hiccups in wide spread usage of Information technology in health care domain. In such a case Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) provides an opportunity that allows the entire Internet community to use its combined programming knowledge, creativity and expertise to develop software, which could render benefits to whole community without involving cost and proprietary issues. The current paper outlines the general model of F/OSS development and highlights the features of few F/OSS products usable in health care. The benefits offered by F/OSS are very important in terms of flexibility, no licensing issue, negligible cost etc. These have encouraged organizations to adopt F/OSS products.

Keywords

Free software, F/OSS, Health Care, Open Source.

References

[1] World Health Organization Report, 2000, "Why do health systems matter?"

[2] Free Software Foundation, Available: http://www.fsf.org/

[3] R. Stallman (1992), “Why software should be free”, Available: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html

[4] Open Source Initiative, Available: http://www.opensource.org/

[5] Eric S. Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” , Available: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

[6] General Public License, Available: www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

[7] Sourceforge.net, Available: http://www.sourceforge.net/

[8] Netcraft Survey, Available: http://www.netcraft.com/survey/

[9] Care2x, Available: http://www.care2x.org/

[10] GNUmed, Available: http://www.gnumed.org/

[11] OpenEMR, Available: http://www.oemr.org/

[12] RODS, Available: http://openrods.sourceforge.net/

[13] CHITS, Available: http://www.chits.ph/

[14] Mirth, Available: http://www.mirthcorp.com

[15] HIEOS, Available: http://projectkenai.com/projects/hieos

[16] ipath, Available: http://ipath.sourceforge.net

Cites this article as

D. A. Guptax "Free/Open Source Software and Health Care: Benefits and Challenges", International Journal of Innovative Research in Engineering & Management (IJIREM), Vol-3, Issue-2, Page No-73-75, 2015. Available from:

Corresponding Author

Dr. Anu Guptax

Dr. Anu Gupta, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Applications, Panjab University, Chandigarh, India, 09872065533. (anugupta@pu.ac.in).

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