Alberta Lab Interface for Oscar EMR

*Exciting new update on May 15th!
"We just received final AHS approval for our first two offices! Extremely exciting. We're ready to go live once the interface and Oscar version issues have been solved!"


Oscar Host is  creating a labs interface for Oscar EMR in Alberta. We have already passed conformance testing for  Calgary Lab services and the other service areas should be fairly simple to pass once we recieve final approval from AHS. However, there are a couple of issues that will require further work before we can officially release the product.

First, the current version of the Alberta labs importer has been built into the newer version of Oscar 14 which isn't ready for use in most offices. We need to back-port this to Oscar 12.1 which is what most users are currently using in Alberta and around Canada.

Second, due to the way labs are formatted in Alberta and how conformance requires them to be displayed in the EMR there are some user interface issues involving displaying multiple labs on one page that will need to be solved before the system will be ready for in-office use.

We're simply looking to cover our costs for development and testing to launch this new labs interface and we will be attempting to commit this project back to the oscar source code once finished. In the meantime, as Oscar is open-source, should anyone like access to the code we are developing please just let us know.

If you are interested in the continued growth of Oscar in Alberta and throughout Canada please consider supporting this project.

Jordan Visco
CEO - OscarHost
by Cloud Practice Inc.

OSCAR - Making its Way into Canada's Maritime Provinces by Jordan Visco, President & COO of Cloud Practice, Inc.

 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.