ClearHealth

ClearHealth

Developer(s)	Open Source Community
Initial release	2003
Written in	PHP
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	Multilingual
Type	Medical Software
License	GNU General Public License
Website	ClearHealth Users Forum

ClearHealth is an Open Source practice management (PM) and electronic medical records (EMR/EHR/PHR) system available under the GNU General Public License which has received attention as a possible open source option for FQHC and CHC sites. 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 which includes approximately 50 sites and 1,500 users and Operation Samahan , a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) facility in National City, CA with 5 locations. OsNews provides in introduction to the system.

The history of ClearHealth has its beginnings starting with the core developers of several other Open Source healthcare software systems including OpenEMR and FreeMed. Fred Trotter and David Uhlman were heavily involved in creating (Fred) and revising (David) the FreeB billing system which was the first Open Source software to implement the HIPAA X12 standards for electronic billing. Having a US medical billing system available under a GPL license provided an impetus for many other open source systems such as FreeMed, OpenEMR, ClearHealth and MirrorMed to flourish. ClearHealth released its first version in 2003 supporting mainly scheduling capabilities. Its 1.0 release was in October 2005 and included significant additions to the original scheduling capabilities including support for patient registration/demographics, and electronic billing. In July 2007 its 2.0 version was release 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 large set of feature additions to support the specialized needs of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC) and other CHC/RNC facilities.

A commonly used fork of the ClearHealth system is MirrorMed.

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 similar 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. .

An active user community is available from online forums and downloads are available from sites such as FreshMeat and SourceForge.

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 and Continuity of Care Record (CCR) formats.

The ClearHealth system is fully compliant with HIPAA security provisions .

External links

• "ClearHealth User Forums".
• "MirrorMed".
• "SourceForge Site". (SourceForge}
• "Primary Care Coalition".