Of Hospitals, Health and Private Information

Much has been made in the media recently concerning the waste of taxpayers money related to the move towards Electronic Medical Records. Couple the potential for a fiscal boondoggle with the threat of a large scale privacy invasion by the government and we have much to be concerned about.

OSCAR users believe that we have the solution - freely licensed, government certified, standards based, and highly secure open source.

Vancouver Sun June 15, 2009 2:06 AM

Many doctors have grave concerns about the privacy implications of large centralized government databases containing people's detailed personal health information. Many doctors are also excited about the potential for improved patient care with the use of electronic medical records.

The United Kingdom has spent more than £13 billion centralizing patient records in government databases. It has been an acknowledged fiasco.

In a 2008 British Medical Association poll, nine out of 10 doctors said they don't trust the government with patient data security.

What can we do, instead, to gain the benefits of technology without spiralling costs and privacy violations?

In Canada, huge savings to taxpayers could be achieved with the use of the free open-source medical-record software developed at McMaster University, known as OSCAR.

In collaboration with Harvard and MIT, OSCAR has also developed MyOSCAR, an open-source personally controlled health record (PHR) that lets doctors securely "push" information like lab reports and clinical summaries from their electronic office records to a patient's PHR. The patient can log into his or her PHR from home or when seeing a specialist.

With PHRs, patients become the custodians of their key cradle-to-grave medical information.

Why are we spending millions of tax dollars on proprietary software when there is open- source software that does as much, or more? Why aren't we looking at alternatives like PHRs for the long-term storage of personal health information?

The good news is that more and more doctors have asked these questions and decided that OSCAR makes more sense.

David Chan, MD

Associate professor of family medicine and director of information technology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont.

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 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.

OSCAR - The #1 Open Source EMR in Canada

OSCAR users may believe it to be an obvious statement, considering the large number of clinics and doctors that rely on OSCAR everyday in support of their delivery of world class patient care, but OSCAR is the #1 open source EMR in Canada.

OSCAR powered clinics can be found across this great, multicultural land, from Prince Edward Island on the Atlantic Ocean, across 6,000 kilometers of lands and lakes to Vancouver Island on the Pacific.

There is a French version of OSCAR being developed in Quebec, and there is a Portuguese version of OSCAR that was developed in Brazil.

OSCAR EMR is spreading everyday! Recently, OSCAR has been gaining a global footprint.

To illustrate, the map below shows the global downloads of the OSCAR installation tutorial in the last couple weeks.



What this graphic shows is that on average, every day, someone in the US is reading about installing OSCAR. Every second day, someone in India and someone else Mexico is doing the same. Once a week, someone in Argentina and Austria is giving it a go.