Interview With LibreHealth Open Source Health IT Project Leader Judy Gichoya

LibreHealth is the largest health IT project to emerge recently, particularly in the area of free and open source software. In this video, Dr. Judy Gichoya of the LibreHealth project explains what clinicians in Africa are dealing with and what their IT needs are. Both developed and developing countries need better health IT systems to improve patient care. In the developed countries, electronic records and other health IT systems sprout complexities that reflect the health care systems in which they function. But these IT systems are far removed from real-life needs of doctors caring for patients, and have transformed physicians in the US into its largest data entry workforce.

In developing countries, scarcity is the norm, and gains cannot be achieved without innovative approaches to delivering health care. The LibreHealth team hopes to learn from both the failures of proprietary IT systems and the opportunities missed by various open source systems such as OpenMRS and OpenEMR. Dr. Gichoya describes the future of open source health IT systems and the health projects united under LibreHealth. The project seeks to provide transparency and be a patient advocate when developing and deploying health systems...