Adoption of Open Source Software in Healthcare

The Open Source (OS) platform is a new paradigm for software development in which several parties serve as volunteers in the design, coding, testing, debugging, distribution, and documentation of OS software projects. Open source software (OSS) is experiencing an exponential growth in several industries such as finance, sales and marketing, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing. However, the adoption of OSS in healthcare has been slow despite the availability of several quality applications for the healthcare industry. In this paper, we outline the salient characteristics of OSS, including the development process for OSS, license types, and revenue models, and then discuss major factors that affect the uptake of OSS by organizations. With a detailed discussion of BI (Business Intelligence) and other open source applications available in healthcare, we conclude that the adoption of OSS in healthcare requires a comprehensive understanding of not only the needs of the healthcare sector, the types and complexities of OS applications, and how they interact with various organizational factors.