"Daniel L. Johnson, MD" wrote: > > Michael Tiemann, an alert fellow (CTO at Red Hat), sent me this link > telling of a Malaysian effort to create an open source EMR.
I suspect that it might be more accurate to describe it as an EMR built using open source software components. To quote the article: "PNS is currently being offered at no cost under the pilot project; PCDOM will decide on its price when it's finally launched. According to Dr Cheah, the price will be based on the number of systems sold, the cost of continued development, and the types of support services doctors want. However, she expects that when PNS goes live officially, each clinic will pay less than RM1,000 for a PNS package that would include the Red Hat Linux 7.2 operating system, Apache webserver software, PHP-based scripts, applications and a MySQL database running on the clinic's server." Note that 1000 Malaysian Ringgits is about US$260. So it looks like they will be attempting some degree of cost recovery, perhaps with bundled support, and if that is the case, end users probably won't be at liberty to modify or at least re-distribute the source code. But it will at the very least be shared source, since it looks like is built with PHP and AFAIK there is no practical method of distributing a PHP application without the source (and a good thing too!). None of the above observations and conjectures are by way of criticism, BTW - it looks like they are being sensible in trying to establish a sustainable funding model for the project. Tim C > > It begins, "The Primary Care Doctors Organisation Malaysia (PCDOM) has > chosen Open Source software for its PrimaCare Network Services (PNS) > project. Founded in 1996, PCDOM is the national organisation of general > practitioners. PNS is a healthcare system that comprises a patient and > clinical management and support system, and an online electronic > healthcare community that would contain information accessible and > pertinent to doctors, patients, their families, healthcare and > pharmaceutical companies." > > >http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2002/4/26/technology/26clinic&sec=technology
