I’m very pleased to announce that Medical, the universal Health Information System, is finalist on Sourceforge 2009 Community Awards.

With over 47,000 nominations, the community has chosen 85 finalists in 12 categories. Medical is among the best 10 projects this year for government.

This is very exciting and rewarding. To be among the 10 best projects (sharing the space with projects like Open Office) shows the recognition from the community to humanitarian projects like Medical, and positions open source in health sector, an area limited to proprietary vendors until now.

I would like to extend my gratitude to all the scientists and doctors that are working on the project (from Argentina, Belgium, India, Indonesia, Germany, USA, Uruguay… ) and to all of you who have trust our project by using it, voting it or letting others know that such project exists.

We have a couple of weeks now to make the choice for the winner, so please go to and vote for Medical in the Best project for Government.

vote now

Thanks again and congratulations to all of you that made this happen. We’ll see you at OSCON 2009 (San Jose, California, July 20-24 ) !
Luis Falcon

About Medical

Medical is an open source project with the goal of providing a universal Health Information System, where health professionals and institutions around the world can benefit from it, independently of their economic status.

Medical optimizes collaboration among health professionals, makin emphasis in Primary Care and Family medicine. It makes use of industry standards (ICD-10), which proportionante the basis for epidemiological studies.

Medical has been designed with scalability in mind. It can deal with millions of patients. Any country or NGO can evaluate their habitants conditions, both from the clinical and the socio-economic / sanitary point of view. This helps to early detect hot-spots, disease vectors and epidemics, specially in developing countries.

Doctors, nurses, computer scientist and sociologist from countries like Argentina, Germany, Uruguay, Spain, Belgium, France, United States, India or Indonesia are actively working together to make medical a reference point in medical informatics.

More Info : http://www.thymbra.com/en/solutions/health

Medical Project at Sourceforge : http://medical.sourceforge.net

I just got back from Kampala. I must say it was a great experience.

The congress ( IST-Africa ) was a success and it gave the chance to meet and network with wonderful people (NGOs, doctors, students, … ). Let’s not forget that the main point of these type of events is to help out and work together with the emerging communities and countries. At least that’s what it should be.

That being said, the presentation of Medical HIS and EMR, had very good comments. We explained the way we are implementing on rural Argentina. We are now in contact with local doctors from Africa and they are willing to work on the localisation of Medical for different countries in that continent.

Many health professionals told me how useful Medical would be for epidemiology studies on HIV / AIDS. The strong focus on the family medicine and socioeconomics, together with the use of industry standards (such as ICD-10) and its scalability makes Medical a perfect solution for epidemiology studies with large amount of data.

Version 0.0.33 has just been released, with the appointment manager, a great way of visually displaying the appointments for different doctors, specialties and institutions.

Please checkout the Medical homepage on sourceforge http://medical.sourceforge.net for the latest news.

If you are interested in collaborating in the project for your country or NGO, please drop us a line to medical@thymbra.com

Thanks
Luis

Medical keeps growing and that is definitely good news 🙂

I just got back from the north of Argentina, where we are working in the implementation of Medical in a Primary Care Center.

The implementation of Medical in the Primary Care Center will optimize the team work among doctors, administrative workers and health promotion agents. It’s a major project that will translate in a fully operational Hospital Information System. The implementation will not only cover the clinical and socioeconomics data for the patient and families, but all the processes within a hospital (Human Resources, accounting, Supply Chain Management, dashboards, …).

The collected information will be very useful for the health authorities in making effective epidemiological studies and health campaigns, identifying the risk groups in real time and taking proactive measures. There will be a very substantial savings on the medicaments and other goods, since the ordering policies will be automatic.

On this context, I have been invited to participate in IST-Africa 2009 (www.ist-africa.org), that will take place in Kampala, Uganda this May. I am very happy to assist and to be able to talk about the experience of the Medical Project: Implementing an Open Source Hospital Information System (HIS) in rural Argentina.

This project involves a great deal of commitment from a multi-disciplinary team (doctor, nurses, social workers, universities, government health authorities,… ), but I’m convinced that the results are worthed the effort.

I am confident that Medical will translate into a much more efficient way of dealing with public health, and that society will benefit immediately from it.

If you are part of a public health authority, an NGO member and want to contribute or know more about the project, and how could be of help in your region, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

The main project page is at sourceforge : http://medical.sourceforge.net

Thanks
Luis