Clearhealth

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ClearHealth is a widely used^[1] Open Source practice management (PM) and electronic medical records (EMR/EHR/PHR) system available under the GNU Public License. It is currently deployed at more than 600 sites worldwide including commercially supported and self-supported open source installations. There are number of well known installations in non-profit health settings including the Primary Care Coalition network, powering the Community Healthlink System, in Maryland which includes more then 50 sites and 1,500 ^[2] users and Operation Samahan ^[3], an Federally Qualified Health Center facility in National City, CA with 5 locations. OsNews ^[4] 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 it's first version in 2003 supporting mainly scheduling capabilities. It's 1.0 release was in October of 2005 and included significant additions to the original scheduling capabilities including support for patient registration/demographics, and electronic billing. In July of 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. ^[5]

Written in the PHP language and capable of running on most server configurations, windows, linux or OSX, under Apache and MySQL (LAMP)ClearHealth is similar is compliant with the expectations of most Open Source web-based systems.

Considered a milestone in Open Source healthcare by communities such as LinuxMedNews, ClearHealth has been able to make significant progress in providing a system which is usable by a wide variety of practices including those very large and very small ^[6].

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

[edit] Features

ClearHealth is a comprehensive practice management and EMR system incorporating the key categories of functionality for scheduling, patient registration, eletronic 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].