OSCAR Installers from 35 Countries

In the past month, people from 35 countries have taken a look at installing OSCAR.

Below is an ordered list identifying the top ten countries from where the interest has come from:



OSCAR continues to enhance support for international users by delivering support for Internationalization in the upcoming release.

If you rummage through the source, you will see that English, French, and Portuguese modules have already been crafted. Based on the number of global users downloading and installing OSCAR, we can only guess that support for additional languages is just a matter of time.

OSCAR Grows 275% in British Columbia

We've been counting OSCAR users in British Columbia and what we've found was so exceptional that we had to check our math.

Over the last six months, the total number of known OSCAR users in British Columbia alone has jumped to 270!


This represents a 275% growth in the OSCAR user base so far this year.

OSCAR Certifies OntarioMD CMS Spec 3.0

OSCAR Canada is very happy to announce that the OSCAR EMR is now OntarioMD CMS Spec 3.0 (conditionally) certified.

OSCAR is the only open source EMR in Canada that is certified by OntarioMD. Furthermore, no other OntarioMD certified EMR solution gives you complete and unfettered access to your data, the database that it is stored in, and the source code for the solution - now and forever.

As we've discussed before, CMS Spec 3.0 certification is a major achievement in the life of the OSCAR project.

OSCAR users can be very confident that their chosen EMR continues to advance technically and in conjunction with important public standards such as those being defined by OntarioMD.

Preview: OSCAR 9.04

New Encounter window (click on it to see a larger image).

The upcoming OSCAR 9.04 has a number of new features, including time saving one-click-direct-billing-from-the-chart, and additional new CPP boxes.

Data Portability Is A Big Deal

Vendor lock-in. Dirty, despicable words. Vendor lock-down. Even worse words.

Let's say that you are writing your Master's thesis and right before you have to hand it in, your support agreement with Microsoft expires and you no longer have access to your work.

That would be bad. Very bad. So bad in fact that it doesn't happen. When you license Microsoft Office, the Microsoft Corporation can't lock you out of your stuff. After all, your work is your work.

Years after you've left university, you are practicing medicine and using the latest tools. Fantastic tools like the modern EMR.

Things in life change and perhaps you decide that you want to move to a new practice or adopt some new technology. Perhaps you are not moving, but your vendor has expired or is no longer responsive to your needs and you need move your medical records to a new system.

A lot of physicians are in this exact position today. Unfortunately, many of these physicians are having a crash course in the nuances of being, for the lack of a better word, screwed.

Before spending once minute inputing a single piece of valuable information into your EMR, ask yourself this:

Is my relationship with this vendor going to last FOREVER?

Then, look in the system for the data export feature.


This is the data export window in OSCAR.

Click a couple buttons and take your information with you.

It is that easy.

Has OSCAR Become the #2 EMR in Ontario?

We know that OSCAR is the #1 open source EMR in Canada, but how does it compare to the proprietary vendors as far as market share?

Most proprietary EMR solutions are extraordinarily expensive to operate. To encourage EMR usage, provincial governments across Canada have developed programs to fund doctors as they transition to electronic records. Because the governments are paying the bills, they have a pretty good idea of EMR market share.

Recently the Ontario government published EMR market share statistics, current for March 2009, in Ontario.


The unfortunate part of these statistics is that OntarioMD only counts the doctors that have been funded by the government, and not the actual number of doctors using an EMR.

OSCAR users have recently been counting themselves to get a sense of how large our community is. Our current understanding is that there are 438 physicians using OSCAR in Ontario.

Further analysis of the data leads to an interesting conclusion - OSCAR may now be the EMR in Ontario with the 2nd largest market share, when measured by the actual number of physicians using an EMR.


By updating the OntarioMD statistics, and swapping out funded physicians with just physicians, we find that OSCAR is catapulted into 2nd position, when measuring market share.