I’m not aware of any open source clinical portals, but there are clinical portals in use in the NHS which ‘could be open sourced’.
As part of work with RCPCH delivering Digital Growth Charts we’ve worked with a number of NHS Trusts who have developed their own in-house clinical portals, but they haven’t open sourced them for a few common reasons:
- (Mainly) Insufficient internal developer resource to manage the initial open sourcing work
- Lack of an organisational incentive to open source the portal
- Fear of liability, costs, or additional work resulting from open sourcing
- A (probably reasonable) low expectation of demand from other Trusts to adopt another Trust’s open source portal
- (Frankly hilarious) Trust Finance Director fantasies around the vast sums of money the Trust could make from commercialising its homebrew portal, meaning that any talk of open sourcing is idiotically equated with “we’d be giving away ££££millions in IP”
- An inadequate understanding of the potential of the NHS to save a lot of money by coordinating and collaborating on a few simple OSS projects like this
- An almost criminal willingness to waste NHS (taxpayer’s) money on building the same thing again and again, in secret, badly, across dozens of trusts
(non-exhaustive list)
It might be possible to make friends with a trust which has a homebrew clinical portal that they might let you open source on their behalf? I could put you in touch with some of the devs behind the scenes @mayfield.g.kev (for the 3-4 I’m aware of). And a wider appeal on NHS Developer forum might come up with more trusts?
Links that might be of interest
Open source clinical portals: a model for healthcare information systems to support care processes and feed clinical research. An Italian case of design, development, reuse, and exploitation - PubMed
List of open-source health software - Wikipedia
GitHub - kakoni/awesome-healthcare: Curated list of awesome open source healthcare software, libraries, tools and resources. (maintained by @kakoni)