Healthcare
1 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars. Scroll down for our analysis.
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
| Tool | Stars | Velocity | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
 openemr The most popular open source electronic health records and medical practice management solution. | 5.6k | +17/wk | 77 |
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Our Analysis
OpenEMR is the standard open source electronic health records system, used by clinics around the world. It handles patient charts, scheduling, billing, prescriptions, and reporting. Free and GPL-licensed. The catch is hosting it. EHR data is sensitive and HIPAA-regulated. You're responsible for encryption at rest, access logging, audit trails, backups, and uptime. The PHP and MySQL stack is mature but unforgiving. Plan on a real server with proper hardening, not a $5 VPS. For small practices and NGOs that can't afford Epic or eClinicalWorks, this is a real alternative. Solo practitioners with technical help can run it themselves. Larger practices should pay one of the certified hosting providers (OpenEMR Cloud, Capminds) so someone else carries the compliance burden, typically $200 to $500 per month. The catch nobody mentions: EHR systems are sticky. Once you have years of patient data in one, migrating is brutal. Pick carefully and verify backups actually restore.