Today, in the era of advanced technology, people rely more on the internet to get information about everything. Open-source clinic management software is easy to access and does not require any specific hardware. This software is highly reliable and offers features and support that are better than proprietary software. Open-source software provides full access to the source code, which enables users to customize the software according to their needs. As technology is advancing, software is becoming more complex. Advanced software can be broken down into simpler parts, which can be developed by cooperating with several coders and experts from different regions. Small clinics can make use of the code of larger clinic software, removing features that are not required, resulting in the implementation of software that meets their needs.
Clinic management software is a web-based application that is designed to facilitate both medical and administrative information within a hospital clinic. This software helps to integrate all the daily operations of a clinic such as appointment scheduling, inventory management, pharmacy, billing, patient information, and report generation. Integrating the working of a clinic helps in increasing work efficiency by reducing time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone manual processes. Clinic management software is user-friendly and can be implemented in a fast and cost-effective manner. It offers scalability, which adds to flexibility in using the software. The security features of the software make the clinic’s data confidential and secure.
Definition and Importance
Open-source software has the advantage of allowing users to understand, collaborate, and customize it. It is accessible and can be improved by a wide community of developers. Management software for healthcare needs varied and often specific requirements because healthcare services and healthcare itself are complex. Healthcare software aims to provide a specific low-cost solution that performs high-cost operational activities. Small, low-resource outpatient facilities are not able to afford expensive healthcare solutions and often have complex management needs that must be addressed. The existing proprietary management solutions for healthcare are difficult to afford and do not offer easy customization. Currently, there is good open-source management software available that can be used for most outpatient clinic needs and can be adapted for specific requirements. Additionally, a community-driven approach could add the specific features needed by all users.
A clinic is a healthcare facility that is primarily focused on the outpatient care of individuals. Clinics can be privately managed or associated with public healthcare facilities where medical students are trained by resident staff. Clinic management involves organizing and coordinating the activities of a clinic to provide services for clients in an outpatient environment. Poor management can result in long client waiting times, dissatisfied clients, staff burnout, and a decreased ability to provide adequate medical services to the community. All of these factors can decrease the revenue of the clinic. Healthcare administration is complex, and software can help support the management of healthcare activities, such as recording and reporting data, as well as supporting accounting. These tasks can be done with a proprietary solution, but there are currently good open-source management solutions available.
Open Source Software
Although the open-source philosophy can be applied to any type of software service, many open-source initiatives today concentrate on solution stacks. A constantly growing pool of developers and contributors supports prominent software projects such as the Linux Operating System, the Apache Web server, and the MySQL database server. These programmers create software packages, which are commonly used, very safe, and easy to maintain. Because of the large and active community behind these projects, the source code is continuously enhanced and bugs fixed. Commercial software solutions’ owners can be worried about the lack of expense and support for open-source alternatives. In fact, several corporations are selling open-source packages, supporting community-based solutions. The business model of these businesses is focused on consultancy and customization services.
Open-source software is a type of program that is made up of code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. For certain reasons, a growing number of software applications are being produced in the public domain. Open-source software often refers to the creation of a computer program in which the source code is open to the public. Anyone can change and use the source code for any purpose. With open-source software, the emphasis is on the free exchange of ideas and collaborative development. For both businesses and individuals, open-source software has many benefits. When users can access code, they can repair unreliable software, benefiting from greater flexibility and freedom. Despite being free, open-source software can often be more cost-effective. Without incurring the cost of access fees, users will allow as many users as they like to execute the program.
Overview and Benefits
Managing a clinic can be a hectic task. Apart from treating patients, there are many tasks involved in running a clinic, including keeping track of patients’ appointments, their medical records, and doctors’ schedules, as well as the management of the clinic’s inventory and the financial transactions that take place. Clinic management software can help clinics automate these tasks. Today, there are many clinic management software packages available. Some of these software are open source. The use of open source software has been increasing, and many people – especially in developing countries – are turning towards using open source software because they are free, which helps in reducing the costs of managing a clinic. Furthermore, using open source software can increase the credibility of a clinic.
Clinic management involves a lot of work, including the management of patients’ data, keeping track of the appointments of the patients, the management of doctors and other staff and their schedules, and other supplementary tasks. Open source clinic management software is software that can help in the automation of most of the tasks involved in managing a clinic. Using this software could benefit clinics in many ways, including reduced costs of management, increased revenue through more efficient work, and increased credibility. In this chapter, we review four available open source clinic management software packages. Then, we present the results of a combined and comparative analysis using the unified modeling language. Lastly, we summarize the comparison and provide our concluding remarks.
Clinic Management Software Features
Another system that is specific because, in place of digital health files (EHR), that keep such records data due to the fact the bed quantity and standing regarding all beds throughout the clinic, keep records data on affected person schedules, and assist clique management and accounting systems. A splendid clinic info system integrates those standards as lots soever manager including intranet assets regarding the clinic to prototype, say and replace the programs in accordance to the unique desires concerning the clinic. Data requirements are aided among language, structure, definitions, and codes concerning facts relied on concerning the system.
A concordant clinic software code can all tell chance diminish the untold written material concerning clinic management and, therefore, the unending concern over affected person care. Today’s glorious clinic software offers platforms to style and develop the stock, the scientific schedule, accounting operations, affected person records data, and elements of data management, safety, and reporting. Its systems assist completely preempt the paper path of affected person admission, diagnosis, affected person care, and prescription writing. At the core concerning the health concerning any info generation system are the info standards.
Key Features and Functionalities
Many open-source clinic management programs typically include additional modules that allow the software to better meet the needs of a particular clinical setting. Some available modules extend the core functions to include the ability to improve the management of patient flow, assign, track, and recharge patients for services provided by the clinic, make the program easier to install, configure, and support through the use of a centralized server for storing software settings, implement electronic medical records by scanning paper documents, using optical character recognition, and securing confidential medical information, communicate and exchange data with other systems, handle pharmacy information, and customize other clinic-specific needs. Additional modules and features can also be developed and added to the software to extend its functionality further.
Open-source clinic management software programs generally offer several key features and serve many functions. A major advantage of an open-source program is its ability to be easily expanded through the addition of new modules or components. The core functions provided by many open-source clinic management programs include the ability to maintain patient information, schedule patient appointments, reduce patient waiting time, provide patient check-in and visit documentation, maintain and search patient medical records, create and manage user accounts and security settings, report and audit clinic activities, and customize the software to work in a particular clinical setting.
Comparison of Open Source Clinic Management Software
In this chapter, we compare and contrast the most popular open source clinic management software. The software projects selected are FreeMED, ClearHealth, OpenEMR, OSCAR McMaster, and Gollum. In selecting projects to investigate, we used two main sources. The first being an extensive list of open source healthcare software from Open Health News, which is a news and information service center for open source health information technology. The second source was Source Forge, which is currently the largest repository for open source software. Many of the projects listed in Open Health News are dormant or incomplete, so we eliminated those projects. Next, we gauged the activity of the remaining projects by examining mailing lists, issue tracking, and code commits. Following this step, we obtained the most active projects and then selected the projects with the best chance of success, judged by modernity, use of web technologies, ease of customization, and architecture. This section details our selection of the major projects available in the domain of clinic management, as well as our work in analyzing these projects.
The goal of this work has been to thoroughly inspect the available open source clinic management software, drawing an extensive list from and filtering it down to the most active or mature. This paper provides an overview of the most popular open source clinic management software along with an analysis of their features, components, and architecture. The project with the most attractive or most modern architecture has been further examined for a more detailed view. Finally, a comparison table is provided for easy reference.
Criteria for Comparison
The clinic management software comparison is done based on the following features: Appointment System, Doctor Calendar, Patient Dashboard, Prescription, Billing System, Electronic Medical Record, Telemedicine, Drug Interaction, Data Security, User Interface. Mentis Clinics and MyOPD are only providing the doctor and patient web application. However, Mentis Clinics does not provide any open-source code. MyOPD is fully open-source, but its focus is more on mobile applications. Pocket-Clinic is providing full source code, but it also lacks a cloud deployment method. READY! is providing full source code and provides a method to deploy on the cloud. It is based on Odoo, which is a very extensive open-source ERP. However, it lacks many features as discussed above.
The comparison is based on a set of features and attributes, meaning which are available or not available, or partially available in some software. As stated earlier, the compared software is cloud-based and developed to run on the web. Data security is also one of the concerns, and it has been ensured that some basic level of data security features within the applications. The comparison is shown in Table 1 based on these criteria. Some of the features have been specifically included, such as telemedicine features or an extensive patient dashboard, which are not readily available in most of the available open-source clinic management software. And some features are excluded, such as a financial management system, which is out-of-scope of this study.
Implementation and Integration of Open Source Clinic Management Software
The Web-Odoo-OpenMRS architecture can be implemented as a solution for clinics that have less than 20 users. For larger clinics, the Odoo-OpenMRS-Mirth/OpenELIS architecture can be used. One of the key advantages of this solution is that the core systems: OpenMRS, OpenELIS, and Odoo come out of the box with the standard features and can be used instantly. During the implementation of commercial off-the-shelf software, deploying can be done quickly, but a lot of time is taken when the system has to be customized extensively. In the context of these open systems, the customization efforts come in when integrating and enhancing the core systems, and not for the core systems themselves.
In this age of digital transformation, it is necessary to implement technology in every field to modernize operations. The field of health is a sector that witnesses significant benefits from digitalization. For small to medium clinics where proprietary Clinic Management Software is too expensive, OpenMRS and Odoo can be combined to create an affordable custom solution that covers most of the requirements of a clinic. Since they are open-source, they can be further customized and enhanced.