Hospitals and health care institutions in the European Union are increasing their use of open source software.
One recent example of a medical organisation moving to open source, is the University Hospital of Clermont Ferrand. It began using open source software to consolidate data from multiple computer systems in order to improve its invoicing.
The University Hospital's use of the open source data integration tool Talend Open Studio is described in a case study by the open source company of the same name, published on 3 July. Regarding the open source application, the report quotes doctor Jean-Christophe Jourdy from the hospital's Medical Information Department: "Its ease of ownership is a major benefit."
Says Jourdy: "Open source is now an essential tool for public services including hospitals, to reconcile budgetary and technical constraints without sacrificing performance or reliability of their IT system."
Other examples of medical institutes switching to open source include the medical centre of German city of Görlitz. The centre has been using open source since 2003, for instance for managing more than a thousand email accounts. It also uses the collaboration server Open-Xchange, making office tools such as calendars and emailing available through a webbrowser.
Centralising this installation has minimised the time needed for configuration and maintenance, explained Helmut Stahr, director of the Görlitz medical centre, in an interview last year. Moving to open source has furthermore helped to reduce software licence costs.
In Belgium, the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Tivoli in the city of Louvière, in 2006 estimated that about 25 percent of its software is now open source, for instance using ERP software Compiere, proxy server Squid, email application Thunderbird and VPN software openVPN. It also uses open source software to study X-ray photographs, K-Pacs.
Also in Belgium, the five campuses of the University Hospital Leuven last year renewed their website, basing it on the open source content management system Drupal.
In the Netherlands, the St Antonius hospital in the cities of Utrecht and Nieuwegein is about to migrate to an almost complete open source IT environment. It's 2800 desktops will run Ubuntu GNU/Linux, using OpenOffice for office productivity tools. In an interview by NOiV, the Dutch government's open source resource centre, published on 3 August, Gerrit Krediet, head to the IT department, says he expects that in September next year some five hundred to a thousand PCs will be running Ubuntu.
A second Dutch example is the psychiatric polyclinic Bosman, a chain of five clinics in the centre of the county. The chain uses open source exclusively, according to NOiV. The polyclinic's use of tools such as OpenOffice, Asterisk and OpenEPD are topic of a presentation organised by NOiV on 1 October in the city of Utrecht.
More information:
University Hospital of Clermont Ferrand (case study in French)
St. Antonius Hospital (case study, in Dutch)
Bosman GGz (announcement, in Dutch)
Medical centre of German city of Görlitz (OSOR news item)
Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Tivoli (case study, in Dutch)
New web site for UZ leuven (in Dutch)