However, the current adoption rate of open source software within health care field remains low. Mailing list discussions among health care professionals point out that the lack of vendor support; management
I think this statement is wrong. Use of software even among health professionals goes far beyond single health record aplications which - true enough - are not widely used in open source form yet.
However, about 70% of the software we use in my group practice is open source:
- Gnu/Linux with standard free sofware as file/mail/web servers and Internet gateway
- Abiword for regular correspondence
- OpenOffice for spreadsheet and presentation needs
- Mozilla for web browsing and e-mail
- Gnucash for accounting
- rsync for backup
and so forth. Actually, many if not mosty of the practices in our area have similar setups. So, free software is greatly used and appreciated - only our domain-specific software (2 packages) are not.
Horst
