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[Gnumed-devel] Medical/Dental OSS survey
From: |
Kevin |
Subject: |
[Gnumed-devel] Medical/Dental OSS survey |
Date: |
Mon, 24 Apr 2006 02:49:34 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 (Macintosh/20060308) |
Hi List-
I'm new here, but very interested in GNUmed and similar projects. My
wife is a dentist and I'm a computer geek with near-fanatical attachment
to Linux and other OSS and more than 10 years of experience with Linux,
so GNUmed and similar projects are extremely interesting to me for many
reasons. I'm generally interested in all such projects, but especially
interested in non-hospital, independent practice oriented projects like
GNUmed.
Lately, I've been trying to conduct a very thorough search for medical
and dental practice management software tools in the open source arena.
There does not seem to be much in the way of stable, production-ready
products that match that description right now, but I have found some
interesting projects and thought I'd list some of the ones I've found
(in case they are new in this forum) and try to open a discussion in the
hopes of learning about some others that list-members may know about
that I'm clueless about.
I have spent several hours browsing and searching through this list's
archive on gmane, and the archive has made me aware of a number of
projects that I was previously unaware of, and for that I'm already
grateful to the members here who are working on GNUmed. I'm also very
grateful that you are all developing GNUmed. I hope to be able to use
it in my wife's business someday, though as you all readily agree in the
archives, it's far from ready for production use today. I may even be
able to contribute to the project at some point, but first, I just
wanted to start this discussion and see what shakes out as a result.
I know about the following projects (and I offer my personal
opinion/commentary which is based on very cursory review of them in
parentheses). I'd love to see other list-members do something similar
with regard to these projects (and any others not listed here) in
follow-up messages:
-odontolinux (apparently a LAMP-type web-based application; seems like
it might be a dead OSS project---is anyone using this in production?
has there been any recent development?)
-Open Dental (www.open-dent.com It uses MySQL for the database engine
and I've explored this a little and though it seems reasonably stable
and usable to me (and is apparently now in production use in a number of
settings), one thing that bothers me about it is that it currently runs
only in Windows, awaiting further mono development work before it will
run in Linux or OSX; additionally, it does not seem to have a community
of developers behind it, but rather, a single dentist who is also a
programmer (must be an amazing fellow to be able to make a living as a
dentist and produce an apparently-stable production-ready practice
management suite in his spare time... impressive!))
-ClearHealth (from a company called Uversa; see links at:
http://www.uversainc.com/site/Software
http://clear-health.com/site/software/clearhealth.html
http://www.op-en.org
This company claims that their products: OP/EN ClearHealth and Uversa
ClearHealth are both fully GPLed open source products, the latter being
a commercial product with commercial support options and the former
having no commercial support options (apparently for those who are
technically capable themselves) (see link at:
http://clear-health.com/site/software/clearhealth/faq.html). This also
seems to be a LAMP-type web-based application but apparently there is at
least one major organization who has the product in production use and
there is also a HOWTO on their wiki for installing it on Debian:
http://www.op-en.org/wiki/index.php/ClearHealth_on_Debian_%28sarge%29) )
I also found this list:
http://www.linuxmednews.com/LMNProjects/Projects/Practice%20Management/folder_contents
some entries of which are really nothing but ideas at this point, though
(LinuDent).
So, to wrap up, would the other list members be so kind as to reply to
the list with any knowledge or commentary on the three projects I list
above and perhaps any other projects you're aware of that I don't list here?
My short-term goal here is to find a stable, production-ready dental
practice management software suite for my wife's business in the near
future and at this point, it seems to me that for practical purposes
(electronic insurance claims, stable, HIPAA-compliance, etc), there are
not many options available right now, but it's clear to me that the
people on this list have been thinking about this issue for a long time
now and I hope that I might learn something from you regarding that
short-term goal. That said, however, I also have a view of the
long-term and I'm a strong supporter of open source projects and I know
I'd enjoy helping to make something like that become a reality at some
point in the future, regardless of what my wife chooses for her business.
Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any replies.
-Kevin
- [Gnumed-devel] Medical/Dental OSS survey,
Kevin <=