OSEHRA 2013: Open Source EHR Agent to Hold Second Developers Summit

David Raths | Healthcare Informatics | August 10, 2013

Nonprofit OSEHRA brings together community of software developers, clinicians, business leaders and other practitioners.

A recent study of safety net clinics adopting open source electronic health records found that although the average cost of an open source program was 30 percent to 60 percent lower than that of a similar commercial EHR system, several obstacles remain. The main challenges to increased adoption, according to to the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, are the cost of modification and training and a lack of internal expertise to customize the systems.

Next month, technical and business executives working to improve users’ success with open source EHRs will meet in Bethesda, Md., at the Second Annual Open Source EHR Summit & Workshop put on by the Open Source Electronic Health Records Agent (OSEHRA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating innovation in electronic health record software. The OSEHRA community has grown to more than 2,300 members...

Open Health News' Take: 

The emphasis of the OSEHRA Summit will be on the VistA electronic health record (EHR) system which is widely deployed across the U.S. and around the world. For example, see the article on "VistA Intsllations in New York & New England". Also, note that through its academic affilliation agreements, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) trains over 100,000 clinicians every years in the use of the VistA system - see "VHA Quietly Provides EHR Training to Physicians in the U.S.".   -  Peter Groen, Senior Editor, Open Health News