Medical and Healthcare related software at Software Repositories/Directories

Long walk through many Software repositories , To find new classifications , new categories added ,new tags. everyday … we finally got shying new categories for healthcare and medical software … Of course am talking about Free and Open source software …

A discussion with Moaz A.e Eldeskey ( GP ,and developer ) , Ahmed Shabana ( Linux Administrator and software developer ) & Waeel Gaber ( Neurologist , and Computer Geek ) .. . about this , issue, ( The Lack of Medical / Health care related Open source software and/or their support ) , we reach a conclusion about that issue , which we find ( somehow ) reflecting a bad progress of the medical informatics area … althou there are some Questions about this situation , but first lets trying to analyze the issue , Development side , Medical side , as well as the Market side ..

1-There is a Need That force us , or inspire us to ( create , Invent . Design and develop ) Medical software .. Is That Need Disappear , Or its Miscommunication and/or Misunderstanding to what is the doctors want ( Need ) ?

2-Many of The developers for the healthcare / medical software are issue related ( Involved somehow in Healthcare filed ) …. and That solve the miscommunication issue ( when the user made what he needs ) but we still talking about the geeks ( healthcare related ) … are their products / projects ( alive ) well supported and updated ???

3- Many of the Authors and Developers look to make their softwares Commercial , so The Healthcare software is not an Opensourced area ( mainly ) … , so the progress to involve developers in developing process of medical software is rare .. So Commercial software means narrow area and selected users , How Come we Expect from This kind of developers to make community when they are planning for Commercial lunch and distribution ???.

4-Classification of medical software is Hazy ( somehow ) , otherwise it classified as scientific software .. the lack of software , and lack of number of people who are interested , may be there is no knowledge of the classification needed … as my Teacher : Dr. Walid M . Suggest : ( You can not blame the admins for not interested in what is not interested ) …

There is New wave in the Web , That some of software repositories , added sections to list Healthcare and Medical software …

Hotscribts.com : That Created a new category , in PHP scripts and programs , called ( Healthcare ) , That category created Months ago , as i remember ( and planned to write about it since i saw it ) .Healthcare Category in PHP classification holds about 14 Script/program , but in Python it holds none ( As i remeber there are a famous 2 emr. Made with Python/Zope ) , and other Clinic and research center management , developed using python ,( i wrote a review about it year ago ) .

Sourceforge.net : Takes Special care of Medical software and Bio-Informatics Related software , so you have 2 categories :
- Medical Science apps.: Which holds over 500 medical related so far .
- Bio-Informatics : Which Holds over 1200 Opensource project that related to Bio-Informatics Software.

Debian Packages : The software repository for Debian (*.deb ) , there is no such category for medical related software .. althou there are many EMRs , can run on Debian and Debian Based Distros . But :
- There is Scientific Category ( Basic tools for scientific work )
- You May use The Search ( Powered by Google ) : as for EMR , To Get a list of related medical (emr) software , which in the Debian Repositories .
- Interested to see a medical software that sun with Debian/Debian Based Distros . You may Take a look .

rubyforge.org : as many may consider Ruby as new programming language , and it just float on the surface the past few years , even it’s an old one somehow , but it seems Ruby did not get the attention of many developer whom are into the medical informatics development .
- Categories List : shows a Scientific/Engineering softwares .

Google Code : Google Code seems to got more attention from many open source software developers , But what do i have to search about , I tried EMR in the search text filed and all what i get Only one project , Try EHR ( You’ll get 2 ) .. :
- UnifiedHealth
- PatientTracker.
- Turbocare : a Hospital Management System .

(p.s : if you want to start your search journey about free open source software , sometimes you may see description without code or download ) ]

Hamza

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