A decade back, many educational institutions used to spend millions of dollars on proprietary OS & software. Today, most of these institutions have moved to open source alternatives.

With the widespread use of open source software in the industry, it has become easy to share the work and collaborate with people across the globe in a cost effective manner.

Healthcare institutions are still suffering from this problem even today.

A proprietary EMR/HIS system costs millions of dollars to healthcare organizations. Even after paying such a high price, these systems are not usually ineroperable, needing a complex intagration to your other software assets like ERP or LIMS.

Medium and large scale healthcare institutions spend a good chunk of their revenue to procure proprietary HIS/EMR software systems. Out of this revenue, a good portion of it is spent solely on the licenses and renewals.

Many institutions build their own HIS software by hiring a tech team. The cost of maintaining the team and the software increases exponentially as the software system evolves.

An easy way to reduce this burden is to encourage the adoption of open source software. When healthcare institutions use open source software, they save huge amounts of money on the licenses. When they build additional features on top of existing software, it will help the entire community of users.

In India, every year 7% of the population is pushed below the poverty line due to high out of the pocket expenditure and 23% of the sick population cannot even afford healthcare. Open source HIS is still in a nascent stage and as the healthcare institutions adopt source software, IT expenditures will be reduced. This will in turn reduce the burden on institutions as well as healthcare availers.