FOSS in the 21st Century

Growth of Open Source Solutions in Healthcare in the 21st Century

The use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) solutions by health care providers and organizations is an increasingly important trend today. The number of FOSS solutions currently available has grown to be quite substantial. The number of new FOSS health care solutions under development is equally impressive.

It is important to recognize that a wide range of FOSS solutions are already in use in health care, generally consisting of technical tools and business applications - Linux, Apache, Open Office, mySQL, FireFox, and other fairly well known products. In addition, there are a large number of health care specific FOSS solutions that have also been developed and are being widely deployed, such as OSCAR, FreeMed, MedLine, Open EMR, OpenMRS, BLAST, ClearHealth, Epi Info, Mirth, SaTScan, VistA, RPMS and many more.

Ongoing collaborative development efforts to create many new FOSS health care software applications for the 21st century such as personal health records (PHR), health information exchange (HIE), genomic biorepositories, and other solutions are also well underway. These FOSS products are being released under one or more open source license arrangements that allow health care providers to acquire and use these tools at no cost.

To learn more about these many open source solutions, visit the COSI Health IT web site. If you know about some really great, reliable health IT systems that are being used by others let us know.