If a couple of maritime provinces
are any indication, OSCAR may be picking up speed in its spread among community medical practices throughout
Canada. While most current users of OSCAR are located in Ontario and BC, an
increasing –albeit slowly – number of medical professionals in other regions appear
to be adopting the free EMR Open Source Technology, a full featured practice
management web application that includes scheduling, billing, prescriptions and
more. Two of the more recent medical communities to start using OSCAR are those
in the provinces of New Brunswick and Newfoundland.
For relatively small physician communities
like those in New Brunswick and Newfoundland, OSCAR definitely makes sense. For
years, New Brunswick in particular only had one electronic medical record system
(EMR) and apparently many physicians were not all that happy with it. They
needed an alternative and with OSCAR, they have one. Initially developed for Canadian physicians by
staff at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, OSCAR is ideal because it’s
free to download, install and use in whatever capacity a medical practice wants
to as it works best for them; as opposed to paying user and service fees and very
likely being locked in to an EMR service that may not work for a particular
practice. Plus, for a small local
practice that may have limited resources it always helps to be able to secure
reliable technology and services for limited cost whenever possible. That is a
huge benefit that OSCAR offers a medical practice.
At Cloud Practice, providers of
OscarHost.ca, www.oscarhost.ca we see this move into New Brunswick and
Newfoundland as exciting progress for influencing more Canadian healthcare
professionals to get on the OSCAR bandwagon. OscarHost.ca is a service provider
for physicians who want to run on the OSCAR EMR platform without managing their
servers, back up and security.
Physicians in the maritime
provinces and elsewhere who are interested in learning more about OSCAR and
downloading it for their medical practice, can view the official website at http://oscarmcmaster.org.
