The St. Antonius Hospital in the cities of Nieuwegein and Utrecht is considering to make available as open source its IntraZis system for medical records, says Jeroen Baten, recently made responsable for the team developing the system. For the time being, the system will be made available only to other health care institutes, in and outside the country.
The hospital last week stated publicly that it considers to make it available as open source. At a health care congres taking place in Utrecht, the hospital distributed flyers mentioning the system as "open source for health care institutes".
Baten expects that IntraZis, a web bases medical record system, will eventually become open source and be made available on a public software repository. "The hospital first wants to gain some experience in sharing it with other health care institutes. The hospital has been working on this system for the past ten years, and is still a little hesitant to make one of its crown jewels publicly available as open source."
But at the moment, the system is shared without the hospital having settled on a public software licence. "So, it is not at all open source. Yet."
According to Baten, already eight other health care institutions in the Netherlands expressed interest in using the system, and three IT services companies have signed-up to become official service providers.
Donations
In exchange the St. Antonius hospital requests other health care organisations to donate towards the development of the system, either by hiring a developer in-house, or by adding to the development budget at the St. Antonius. Baten: "Were we to add all the features that are now on our wish- list, we could easily staff 24 developers for a entire year."
IntraZis is a web-based medical record system running on the MySQL open source database management system. At the St. Antonius hospital, it runs on CentOS-servers.
Enabling re-use and ensuring vendor independent IT systems are the two reasons for this Dutch hospital to use open source software. All of its IT staff already uses Ubuntu desktops and other open source tools, and the open source desktop system is also gradually implemented in other parts of the organisation.
More information:
Flyer on the IntraSiz system (in Dutch, pdf)