Towards the Adoption of Open Source and Open Access Electronic Health Record Systems

As the Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems constantly expand to support more clinical activities and their implementations in healthcare organizations become more widespread, several communities have been working intensively for several years to develop open access and open source EHR software, aiming at reducing the costs of EHR deployment and maintenance. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the most popular open source electronic medical records such as openEMR, openMRS and patientOS, providing their technical features and potentials. These systems are considered quite important due to their prevalence. The article presents the key features of each system and outlines the advantages and problems of Open Source Software (OSS) Systems through a review of the literature, in order to demonstrate the possibility of their adoption in modern electronic healthcare systems. Also discussed are the future trends of OS EHRs in the context of the Personal Health Records and mobile computing paradigm.