Open source healthcare software
Low-Cost Cure
GNU Health, a flagship free software project for hospitals, helps ensure affordable healthcare for all, especially in developing countries.
What is the role of free software in healthcare in a developing country, where money is likely to be scarce, where technical and human resources are limited, and where people are forced to improvise more often than in a rich, industrialized country? Is open source only a stopgap solution there, or can it perhaps play to particular strengths? Linux Magazine talked to two practitioners about this. Argentine Fernando Sassetti is an associate professor at the National University of Entre RÌos for the organization of health systems and socioeconomic health policy models. Armand Mpassy-Nzoumba has more than 20 years of experience as an IT manager and IT officer at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Africa and is a research associate at the Technical University of Berlin and a lecturer at the University in Brazzaville (Congo). Both referred to the GNU Health program as a practical example.
What we first wanted to learn about was the work environment of our interviewees: In what size of hospitals do they have GNU Health installed? How many patients are cared for there? How large is the catchment area typically? What is the social situation of the patients? Mpassy-Nzoumba reports that he has already set up GNU Health in hospitals of varying size, specialization, and ownership in Africa, most recently in a private clinic in a suburb of YaoundÈ, the capital of Cameroon. The clinic has 40 beds, employs about 20 medical professionals, and cares for an average of 50 patients per day. It serves a population of about 100,000 people, and patients often come from far away. The patients' social situations vary widely, but most of them are poor and have incomes below the national average of $241. Health care costs can consume up to 30 percent of a family's budget, so patients are sometimes reluctant to seek medical help.
Sassetti also talks about having implemented GNU Health, especially in smaller health centers on the outskirts of the city, where mainly the most vulnerable populations are served. He gained his first experience in a small hospital. Within a year of GNU Health's launch, 6,000 people had registered with the system, many of them from rural areas near the city. One of the most recent projects, he said, was a pilot with a municipality in the province of Entre RÌos that had 18 health care providers spread throughout the area.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.