Filipinos father open source electronic health record system

By Erwin Oliva
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 09:09:00 05/02/2008

SINGAPORE -- Filipinos have announced the first beta release of an open source electronic health record application that hopes to pave the way for low-cost electronic health record applications for the healthcare industry, the manager of an international open source network told INQUIRER.net on Thursday.

"This is groundbreaking for several reasons: it is free, portable, and open source that even doctors can contribute to its development," Dr. Alvin Marcelo, manager of the International Open Source Network (IOSN) Asean+3 node based in Manila, in an interview.

Dr. Marcelo said the Asean+3 node of the IOSN commissioned the Free Feathers EHR (FFEHR) project, which is an electronic health record application. The public beta was launched on April 28.

The IOSN Asean+3 is based at the University of the Philippines Manila-National Telehealth Center.

"This release comes six months after the University of the Philippines Manila-National Telehealth Center tasked free/open source software (F/OSS) programmer Nathaniel Jayme and Davao-based F/OSS organization DabaweGNU, Inc. to jointly develop FFEHR," the Davao-based open source organization said in its website.

Dr. Marcelo said this release would allow medical and nursing students, for instance, to start using it to understand electronic health records.

"We can graduate health professionals who are so adept with EHRs. They can't do this in developed countries because of the substantial cost of EHRs, which is mostly proprietary," he said.

Dr. Marcelo said that the public release of the open source application aims to generate more interest in lower-cost electronic health record systems.

"At the outset, an awareness that EHRs can be low-cost can generate new jobs since there will be a demand for customization. For the healthcare industry, this means better documentation and opportunity for better research on health care. We can't do this if we stick to paper-based records.

He said that EHRs in the United States are able to detect medical errors since records are now available electronically. In paper-based records, errors go unnoticed.

"Once the data are in electronic format, we can create algorithms that can detect errors and prevent them from being carried out. That's a little far off but the EHR is the first step toward that, and FFEHR gives us that first step," he said.

The Davao-based open source organization said the FFEHR is not yet ready for production use but it is expected that this initial release will rouse the interest of health care professionals and other developers.

"The increase in beta testers should enable the project to reach stability faster through the increase in bugs reported and through some contributed patches," it said.

Licensed under the GNU GPL3, FFEHR, is available for free download and use by the public including its source code. It can be downloaded from its project website at http://trac.afterfivetech.com/ffehr.

While the FFEHR was developed with the Philippine health care industry in mind, it can be customized for use in other countries.

The IOSN ASEAN+3 was established by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) initiative and is based at the University of the Philippines Manila-National Telehealth Center.