In the healthcare industry it seems like everything is double the cost of what it should be. Well it is time to reverse the pattern and makeup for the bloated expenses with some free stuff. Who doesn’t love free stuff? Sometimes people camp for days on end in front of stores just to a get a twenty dollar item for free. We decided to make it a little easier and skip the camping part by providing a short list of some popular no cost applications used in the healthcare industry.
First you may ask, why are these items free? Well there are really two categories that these free applications fall into. The first is that many software companies offer basic or “lite” versions of their full applications to generate more exposure in the crowded software market. Many times the basic versions will handle a majority of your needs. The second category is open source software. Open source typically involves a community of people working together as a whole to create an application that anyone can use and improve upon. Open source is starting to become a rising trend to confront increasing software costs.
Without further ado here is a list some of free applications that may benefit your organization.
- LogMeIn – Free remote access outside the office. Secure and extremely easy to setup
- eDoc Health – Free Healthcare Document Management. Barcode paper forms to automate scanning.
- Open Office or Google Docs – Free office software very similar to Microsoft Office suite. Also compatible with Microsoft file formats.
- Mozy – Free Online Backups for critical files such as QuickBooks. Free version is limited at 2 GB of storage.
- OpenVista – Free Enterprise EMR developed by U.S. government
- VMWare ESXi – Free Virtualized Server Software. This is discussed in more detail in the Virtualization 101 article in this issue.
- Microsoft Steady State – Free Software to lock computer workstations to an optimal state keeping common user caused issue to a minimum.
- K-PACS – Free DICOM Image Viewer that works with your current PACS. Don’t pay a lot to vendors to haveadditional computer view image studies.
- Mirth – Free HL7 interoperability software. Basically it gets all of your healthcare applications talking toeach other via HL7 or other healthcare standards.
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