'Open' Health Education & Training Solutions

The use of 'open source' software to deliver global health education and training solutions to health care provider organizations and medical schools is an important trend to watch. The number of open source and/or public domain health education and training software solutions currently available or under development has grown to be quite substantial.

The use of 'open source' software to deliver global health education and training solutions to health care provider organizations and medical schools is an important trend to watch. The number of open source and/or public domain health education and training software solutions currently available or under development has grown to be quite substantial.

This article briefly touches on a few of the many freely available open source education and health IT software solutions and knowledge bases that are in the public domain that health care organizations should consider exploring.

Education Domain

The following are some key findings from a report entitled "Best Practices in Open Source Higher Education: The State of Open Source Software" issued by the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness.

  • Almost 60% of higher education institutions have acquired and implemented open source infrastructure products, e.g. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Open Office, etc.
  • Open source education applications or tools being most considered by universities include: Sakai (28%), Moodle (23%), uPortal (20%), OSPI (12%), OKI (10%), SCT Luminis Platform (9%), and Kuali (8%)
  • OpenCourseWare is a collaborative, open source educational content solution.
  • Sakai is open source software for education, research and related scholarly activities.
  • Kuali is a suite of open source administrative software modules for use in higher education.
  • Moodle is an open source Course Management or Learning Management System. It is a web application that educators can also use to create effective online learning sites.

Health Domain

The following open source health IT systems can be used in conjunction with the education packages above to create a comprehensive, low cost education and training environment for clinicians.

eMOCHA is a free open-source application, developed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Global Health Education.  It is designed to assist health programs in developing countries improve provider communication and education, as well as patient care.
myPACS is a web-based medical image content management system designed to help clinicians and the international radiology community share their knowledge. See www.mypacs.net
OpenMRS is an international community based open source project that has built a scalable, flexible electronic medical record (EMR) system built on open standards.
RPMS is a public domain or open source Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system developed by the Indian Health Service (IHS). They provide access to online training materials for the various RPMS software modules for health care providers and staff using the system.

Other Selected 'Open' Health Information & Training Links

Conclusion & Recommendations

Universities, medical schools, and other healthcare organizations should seriously evaluate the benefits of including open source health and education software solutions as part of their overall information technology strategy and tool set. The evaluation should take note of the following:

  • Significantly lower and quantifiable Total Cost of Ownership
  • Continually growing weight of global public and private support around free and 'open source' software products and solutions
  • Rapidly growing number of open source success stories in government, education, healthcare and other functional

Finally, the rapid emergence and evolution of open-source technologies is also transforming the delivery and measurement of Continuing Medical Education (CME). Today, healthcare organizations are able to leverage, customize and integrate open source education and health IT software to create innovative, collaborative learning environments that facilitate communication, collaboration, and transfer of knowledge amongst health care professionals.

To see information and links to more 'Open' Health Education & Training resources go to the  Open Health News (OHN) web site.