Open Source Clinical Portals: A Model for Healthcare Information Systems to Support Care Processes and Feed Clinical Research

Open source is a still unexploited chance for healthcare organizations and technology providers to answer to a growing demand for innovation and to join economical benefits with a new way of managing hospital information systems. This chapter will present the case of the web enterprise clinical portal developed in Italy by Niguarda Hospital in Milan with the support of Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, to enable a paperless environment for clinical and administrative activities in the ward. This represents also one rare case of open source technology and reuse in the healthcare sector, as the system’s porting is now taking place at Besta Neurological Institute in Milan. This institute is customizing the portal to feed researchers with structured clinical data collected in its portal’s patient records, so that they can be analyzed, e.g., through business intelligence tools. Both organizational and clinical advantages are investigated, from process monitoring, to semantic data structuring, to recognition of common patterns in care processes.