In a world where vendor-based EHR software and EMR software implementations strain budgets, open-source solutions can help you reduce costs. So what are the top open-source electronic health records (EHR) and electronic medical records (EMR) on the market?

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What This Article Covers

• Best Open-Source EMR / EHR
  • OpenEMR
  • OpenMRS
  • HospitalRun
  • Open Hospital
  • GNU Health
• FAQs
• Next Steps

Best Open-Source EHR/EMR Software

With a variety of open-source EMR / EHR software available, you have the freedom to explore and choose the one that seamlessly aligns with your requirements. These solutions offer versatility, customization and cost-saving potential.

Before we dive into the brief overview of each product along with their benefits and features, let’s first examine their technical aspects to gain a better understanding of the platforms.

Technical Aspects

Now that we’ve looked at the technical framework, let’s break down what these leading open-source electronic health records platforms have to offer:

OpenEMR

OpenEMR is an open-source EMR platform with customizable templates for various patient documents like patient registration forms, consultation notes, treatment plans, progress reports and medication lists.

It streamlines daily admin tasks, enhances patient care delivery and offers a range of electronic features to ease routine burdens in medical practices.

Add patient encounter notes to each appointment using OpenEMR’s calendar. Source

Industry Suitability

Serves general practice, hospital, urgent care, physical therapy and mental health organizations.

User Suitability

Serves general practitioners, clinicians, administrative staff, physicians, nurses and more.

Benefits

• Improve Reminders: Send patients email/SMS alerts for upcoming appointments and treatment sessions. Activate silent mode notifications to receive important messages during meetings, consultations and critical events.
• Boost Revenue: Access patient ledger reports to retrieve details on primary and secondary payment plans, patient balances, new invoices, treatment charges, copays, and other relevant information.
• Accomplish Integration: Integrate with leading clearinghouse systems, including Office Ally, ZirMED and ClaimRev, for digital invoicing needs.

Primary Features

• Patient Portal: Let patients create, manage and track upcoming visits. Send bills, lab tests, treatment reports and more to patients digitally so they can track their health journeys online from start to finish.
• Claims Management: Enable providers to streamline claim processes, encompassing claim creation, X12 file uploading, patient billing and other related duties.
• Medical Billing: Manage patient bills, submit claims using the UB-04 form, track payments and generate financial reports to maintain organizational workflow and revenue records effectively.

Limitations

• Lacks pre-built integration with third parties.
• Lacks a native mobile app for providers.
• Restricts billing notes to a maximum of 63 characters, including spaces.

Pricing

Free and open-source platform.

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OpenMRS

OpenMRS is an EMR solution that provides health care professionals with electronic tools to efficiently manage clerical workflows.

It offers various modules, including documentation, a patient scheduling system, medical billing tools and patient portal software to centralize documentation, simplify billing procedures and electronically book patient appointments.

It enables seamless integration with other platforms to guarantee system accessibility, even in environments with limited resources.

Add, delete and manage OpenMRS modules based on unique needs. Source

Industry Suitability

Serves clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, radiology departments and government health organizations.

User Suitability

Serves clinicians, students, researchers, pharmacists and administrative staff.

Benefits

• Enhance Patient Engagement: Use OpenMRS asynchronous system for simple messages (OASYS) to send important texts. It lets patients receive alerts for upcoming visits, physician messages, lab tests and prescription arrivals.
• Improve Clinical Workflows: Access customizable templates and forms for prompt patient information entry during check-in, consultations, billing and more. Send virtual messages to reduce frequent phone calls for minor patient communications.
• Maintain Patient Records: Attach text notes with patient files using a WYSIWYG editor. Save, present and edit notes on patient encounters.

Primary Features

• Appointment Scheduling: Create physician schedules, book patient appointments based on provider availability and manage waiting lists with real-time updates on cancellations and reschedules.
• Inventory Management: Handle, view and update inventory items and metadata to ensure seamless operations and identify improvement areas.
• Patient Dashboard: Personalize dashboards to view new visits and edit previous patient encounter files. Add labels to mark high-priority or urgent cases.

Limitations

• Requires SQL expertise to migrate data.
• Lacks a user-friendly UI for designing comprehensive reports.
• Doesn’t store previous image versions in the patient image tool.

Pricing

Free and open-source platform.

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HospitalRun

HospitalRun is an offline EHR software designed to efficiently serve health care organizations in remote and rural areas.

It helps manage medicine inventory, patient health histories and treatment diagnoses files. It also provides an automated discharge feature for handling accident and emergency cases.

Create, store and edit patient records using Hospital Run. Source

Industry Suitability

Serves primary care, family medicine, tertiary care and remote clinics, NGOs, and government organizations.

User Suitability

Serves physicians, surgeons, pharmacists, nurses, administrators and clinicians.

Benefits

• Establish Offline Access: Carry patient records to remote clinics electronically. Work offline using CouchDB, PouchDB and built-in REST APIs.
• Customize Hospital Branding: Enhance brand awareness and recognition with logo and color schemes on all paperwork, files and other required areas.
• Enhance Patient Engagement: Send SMS and emails to patients to notify them of their upcoming visits, provide health status updates, and send prescriptions, bills and other requested records.

Primary Features

• Patient Registration: Capture patient demographics, insurance details, medical histories and current medication information to create new digital patient databases.
• Drug Management: Manage your patients’ prescription orders using automated medication order, drug formulary, and drug dispensing tools.
• Appointment Scheduling: Use the built-in calendar to create appointments, view schedules and customize visit times using color-coded labels and brand-specific widgets.

Limitations

• No mobile access.
• Inactive technical staff.
• Infrequent software updates.

Pricing

Free and open-source platform, excluding support and infrastructure costs.

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Open Hospital

Open Hospital is an EMR solution that provides customization capabilities to tailor the system to your unique health care needs.

This comprehensive solution efficiently manages cognitive workflows, enhances patient care, streamlines administrative tasks and centralizes patient records, ensuring optimal organizational functioning.

Create and send electronic prescriptions using OpenHospital. Source

Industry Suitability

Serves hospitals, pharmacies, clinics, ambulatory care providers, and OB-GYN and women’s health organizations.

User Suitability

Serves clinicians, pharmacists, therapists, administrators, physicians and nurses.

Benefits

• Improve Records Management: Record vaccination dates, medication lists and treatment progresses to maintain accurate and up-to-date patient information.
• Monitor Supply Flow: Archive and supervise supply chains to track material and production costs. Manage inventory records to identify products going out of stock.
• Enhance Communication: Let patients text physicians during out-of-office hours for important health-related discussions.

Primary Features

• Appointment Scheduling: Manage scheduled appointments with options to add or remove visits for specific dates. Navigate to past appointment bookings to add encounter notes.
• Laboratory Management: Create, edit and insert new laboratory exams. Search for specific exam sheets by name, ID or date range.
• Medical Billing: Generate patient bills with four areas: bill panel (date, patient and price list), item panel (item, quantity, amount and total), payments panel (date, amount and balance) and buttons panel.

Limitations

• Inactive support team.
• No mobile access.

Pricing

Free and open-source platform.

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GNU Health

GNU Health is an EMR platform that simplifies administrative duties, allowing front desk staff to prioritize crucial clinical tasks.

It automates various physician tasks, such as scheduling, documentation, patient monitoring and reporting, enabling your teams to focus on creating high-quality treatment plans and delivering exceptional patient care.

Track patients’ physiological parameters using GNUHealth. Source

Industry Suitability

Serves primary care, OB-GYN, biomedical, pediatrics and government organizations.

User Suitability

Serves surgeons, physicians, nurses, biochemists and psychologists.

Benefits

• Reduce Workloads: Automate scheduling, documentation and billing processes to liberate staff from excessive, redundant workflows.
• Improve Patient Care: Monitor patients’ physiological parameters, including blood pressure, weight and heart rates along with lifestyle patterns and psychological assessments, such as eating habits, physical activities and energy levels, to create patient-specific treatment and medication plans.
• Improve Office Efficiency: Digitize routine workflows by converting paper-based records to digital ones. Enable physicians to communicate essential details via texts and emails. Save providers’ time on manual note-taking.

Primary Features

• Inpatient Management: Electronically manage hospitalization care, including patient admission, bed allocation, staff assignment, health status analysis and reporting, all in one place.
• Financial Accounting: Track assets, monitor financial procedures and generate daily transaction reports to improve revenue and profitability.
• Prescription Management: Store patient name, prescription ID and medication details, including dose units, drug allergies and adherence routines, for future reference. Email prescriptions directly to patient-preferred drugstores to avoid hassles with prescription collection visits.

Limitations

• Unavailable on Android and iOS devices.
• No DICOM viewer in the health imaging module.

Pricing

Free and open-source platform.

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FAQs

Does using open-source EHR/EMR incur any costs?

Using open-source EHRs and EMRs generally doesn’t involve direct software licensing fees, as many are freely accessible for use.

However, there may be related expenses for implementation, customization, hosting, support and training, which vary depending on your EHR/EMR requirements.

It’s also important to remember that certain open-source platforms may entail a licensing or subscription fee for system usage — even if the majority are freely accessible.

Carefully considering these factors is essential when assessing the overall cost of adopting open-source EHR/EMR solutions.

How do I select the ideal open-source EHR/EMR software for my organization?

Choosing an ideal open-source software for your business holds immense potential to transform your operational efficiency and financial success. Here are some important considerations to make:

Define Your Challenges

Every company faces unique challenges and obstacles on its path to expansion and growth. To propel your business forward, it’s essential to identify and understand these pain points and improvement opportunities.

This deeper understanding of your business challenges will lead you to know your organization better, enabling you to identify how a new application can effectively address these issues.

Develop a Strategy

In this crucial step, you must ask yourself essential questions about this new addition to your business. Assess whether you require a new solution for the entire company or a specific department.

Evaluate the Marketplace

This phase is vital as it allows you to explore and finalize your options. Take a close look at all the available applications and determine which ones align best with your business needs.

How often are updates and new features released for open-source EHR/EMR?

The update frequency and release schedule of new features for open-source EHR/EMR may differ depending on the specific software project.

It’s advisable to review the individual project’s development cycle and roadmap to understand the frequency of updates and new feature releases.

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Next Steps

Open-source electronic health records offer a cost-effective alternative for those seeking enhanced operational efficiency and improved employee productivity. But with various options available, it can be challenging to find the right fit.

Don’t worry, we have you covered.

Use our free comparison report to evaluate a wide range of options and discover the perfect product that aligns with your business needs. It lets you compare product details, like pricing and capabilities, side by side.

What specific company challenges are you aiming to address with this software? How do you view this as an opportunity to potentially transform your business operations? Let us know in the comments.