Coffs Free and Open Technology Network

Medical practices around the world are rushing to roll out Electronic Health Record (EHR) software, in many cases without pausing to consider the freedoms and functionality they are sacrificing in the process. An opinion piece on the LinuxMedNews blog calls this "The Coming Electronic Health Record Software Disaster". The widespread use of proprietary EHR systems:

"... amounts to widely installing Electronic Health Record faucets of tremendous range of shapes, sizes and colors, each with toll booths attached to them, with the intervening plumbing as an afterthought. What the faucets actually do and how and when the plumbing in between will be installed is left as a future exercise."

An article in the journal ADVANCE for Health Information Executives concurs:

"New York City recently awarded a $19.8 million contract to a proprietary EHR vendor, which will permit the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to provide free software to physicians and clinics to be used for care of patients. While this may be a good idea from the standpoint of affordability and interoperability if the patients all go to the clinics that use this particular system, it won't be much help when those patients seek care somewhere else."

Furthermore, the article asserts:

"Universal implementation of proprietary EHR systems has the potential to wrest control of the doctor-patient relationship from doctors and their patients. Unfortunately, most doctors and their patients don't have a clue that this could happen — and already is happening — right under their noses. And, they will be paying for it!"

The answer to these problems, according to LinuxMedNews is "un-compromising advocacy by governments and medical societies for choosing Free and Open Source licensed Electronic Health Record software", which is, they admit "not perfect but [makes] many EHR problems tractable".

ADVANCE declares that "the [US] Federal government should make available a cross-platform, open-source electronic medical record system", making the point that medical professionals have historically been vehemently opposed to proprietary knowledge in other areas of their work (for instance in the patenting of surgical procedures), and that they should therefore adopt a similar attitude to the software used in their practices "to better achieve the ideals of maximizing quality, efficiency and safety in the delivery of care (and thus in public health and medical research)".

Wikipedia has a list of EHR software distributed under free software licenses.