Healthcare
2 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. | 5.3k | +17/wk | 77 |
 goose Goose Swift proof-of-concept README | 2.7k | +4/wk | 52 |
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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.
Goose is an independent iOS app that talks to a WHOOP 5.0 band over Bluetooth and keeps all of your health data on the phone instead of in WHOOP's cloud. Sleep, recovery, strain, stress, cardiovascular load, it pulls the same metrics the official app shows, processes them locally in a Rust core behind a SwiftUI interface, and adds a Coach view that summarizes what the numbers mean. The pitch is data ownership: your biometrics stay on your device. That local-first design is the entire reason to care. WHOOP's own app routes your data through their servers; this does not. For people who want the recovery and strain numbers without handing a company a continuous feed of their physiology, that is a meaningful difference. But be honest about the stage. This is an alpha proof-of-concept aimed at developers, the author openly flags significant performance issues, and the first TestFlight beta is not expected until mid-June 2026. This is something to watch and tinker with, not something to rely on yet. The bigger catch is licensing. There is no LICENSE file in the repo, which means that despite being public it is not actually open source: all rights are reserved by default. Until the author adds a license, you cannot legally fork, modify, or build on it. For a project whose whole appeal is control over your own data, that is the gap to fix first.