by rickst29 » Aug 6th, '13, 23:39
Resurrecting an old Thread, but this might be of interest: If it's a "real" hospital of considerable size, then you're going to want a REAL EMR. Not a mere Toy, written in a few dozen (or a few hundred) hours by "hobbyists".
With just one or two enhancements, It is theoretically possible to install VISTA, the Veterans Administration EMR system, on a Mageia machine. VISTA scales well - from individual Practioner Offices, all the way up to the Indian Health Service, NASA, and the VA itself (multi-location Health Systems, with a need to remain functioning if/when Internet "breaks down".) All of the Development, and the work for "effective use" certification, and lots of other RASUI enhancements, are done and paid for by the US Government - you get it for free.
There is only one thing worse than implementing an Open-Source, but insufficient "toy" EMR, putting genuine Pt. records into it, and then needing to extract/convert all of that data into a better system at a later time. That one thing is: implementing a Proprietary Secret-Sauce EMR, and having it's owner go belly-up in the coming shake-out.
There are perhaps 1000-5000 companies trying to get established in the EMR business, and I think that far less than 5% will survive past 2020. VISTA is nearly certain to be one of the survivors. And it's been established, by legal decisions, that it will remain "Free" via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Because USA Citizens paid for it, and the Source Code contains no secret or confidential information (that's in the Records, not the Program), we can obtain the Code- and it's updates- by request. That fact, along with the huge scalability and history of successful use (over dozens of years) make up for a lot of it's issues: (humongous number of parts; very hard to learn as an Adminstrator; no Pt. Gateway; and not the easiest system for Clinicians, either).