ClearHealth

ClearHealth is an Open Source practice management (PM) and electronic medical records (EMR/EHR/PHR) system available under the GNU General Public License. It has received attention as a possible open source option for FQHC and CHC sites.^[2] It is currently deployed at approximately 600 sites worldwide including commercially supported and self-supported open source installations. There are number of high profile installations in non-profit health settings including the Primary Care Coalition network, powering the Community Healthlink System, in Maryland, USA, which includes approximately 50 sites and 1,500 users^[3] and Operation Samahan,^[4] a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC-Look alike)look alike facility in National City, CA with 5 locations. OsNews provides an introduction to the system.^[5]

History

ClearHealth began when the core developers of several other Open Source healthcare software systems including OpenEMR and FreeMed. ClearHealth released the first version in 2003, supporting mainly scheduling capabilities. Its 1.0 release was in October 2005 and included additions to the original scheduling capabilities, including support for patient registration/demographics, and electronic billing. In July 2007, its 2.0 version was released which added electronic medical records capabilities and an integrated SQL based reporting system.

In 2006, the Tides Foundation provided a grant which funded the development of a set of feature additions to support the specialized needs of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) and other CHC/RNC facilities.

Written in the PHP language and capable of running on most server configurations, Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, under Apache and MySQL (LAMP), ClearHealth is compliant with the expectations of most Open Source web-based systems.

Amongst several open source solutions for the healthcare industry, the California Healthcare Foundation identified ClearHealth specifically as a viable solution based on its evaluation of sites and support in its Open Source Primer on healthcare software.^[6]

Features

ClearHealth is a comprehensive practice management and EMR system incorporating the key categories of functionality for scheduling, patient registration, electronic medical records and CPOE, electronic and paper billing, and SQL reporting. As an open source reference implementation of several interoperability protocols, ClearHealth has support for working with data in HL7^[7] and Continuity of Care Record (CCR) formats.

The ClearHealth system is fully compliant with HIPAA security provisions.^[8]

References

External links

• ClearHealth repository at GitHub
• ClearHealth User Forums
• Primary Care Coalition