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There is a growing need to real time access to patients’ data, scheduling, billing and other practice related issues within the spectrum of healthcare management. Clinicians, healthcare insurers, Pharmacists and Test centers across the United States need to have access to critical information relating to their patients. It is in this context smart phone applications and open source software movement are becoming more and more relevant. Mobility – Role of Mobile Technology Innovations in software applications have paved way for several computationally powerful and user friendly mobile platforms, such as smart phones, tablet computers and personal digital assistants. Encouraged by the sudden acceptability of these products, more and more complex mobile applications have started entering the market in a short span of time with focus on patient wellness. Eight out of ten countries use mobile services for healthcare support, says a recent World Health Organization (WHO) report. According to the Global Mobile Health Market Report 2010-2015 released by “research2guidance” a specialist in mobile application research, “Smart phone applications will enable the mobile health industry to successfully reach out to 500 million of total 1.4 billion smart phone users in 2015.” Recent studies show that doctors and healthcare providers extensively use smartphone applications, thanks to growth of wireless usage. Looking ahead, Cisco predicts there will be 2 billion networked mobile devices in theU.S.by 2015. Physicians now admit that mobility of software movement has opened up channels of improved patient care. Open Source Software Movement With an open source license anyone can publish his/her software, modify it, upload it to other operating systems and use it or share it with others. That raises the question of meeting the demand for affordable software models both in terms of accuracy and price. As a result, more and more clinicians and healthcare organizations are seen following the path of open source software movement. Expanded use of open source software has direct implications for information exchange in terms of funding sources and software supplies. IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have always supported the open source software movement. Experts in medical technology believe that exchange of medical information would get a tremendous boost with the help of open source software. Some of the major benefits of its implementation are – doctors are able to obtain real-time access to Electronic Medical Records (EMR), scheduling, billing, processing other clinical information; and care givers and healthcare administrators among other activities are able to streamline home-based medical care. With open source, mobilization of primary and acute care applications, monitoring of critical alerts vital signs takes place with no loss of time. However, there is a need to exploit the cost advantages of open source wherever such implementations are feasible and practical. With increased mobility of open source tools, movement of patient data through unreliable platforms would be a thing of the past. Cost of care also comes down substantially, promising better life for individuals. Consumers have started demanding continued access to the latest Technologies and open source market holds the key to answering these calls.
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