MedRefer - telemedicine platform

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi all,

Many many moons a ago I was deeply involved into GNUmed. Time has passed and I have not seen a personal need due to being a doctor employed in a hospital rather then small clinic.

Some time ago a colleague and myself have devoted our time and resources to a product called MedRefer.

What started out as an online medical appointment booking solution is now full plattform with all kinds of services for healthcare providers.

Besides online appointment bookuing it features online appointments (videocall), digital questionnaires, doctor-doctor collaboration and much more.

Coming from an FOSS background I always wondered if and when it would make sense to make MedRefer available as OpenSource.

It is a cloud based solution which is deployed on AWS infrastructure but that does not mean potentially it could be hosted and operated on premise.

What we have learned over the years is that creating such a solution is the easier part. The hard part is operating it. This means being in compliance with online privacy laws, being on par with security best practices and more.

I might be wrong but while it makes a lot of sense to deploy a local instance of GNUmed it makes less sense to privately operate a digital health services platform such as MedRefer.

However I am interested in feedback on pros and cons about on making it available as FOSS and risks and challenges when operating it yourself in your private (e.g. cloud) infrastructure.

Very much related to it I was wondering if there is any benefit in thinking about possible integration with GNUmed. Currently, MedRefer does not have any interface to any EMR. Does it make sense/is there a need´ to create such an interface ?

Right now, I am just looking at the German healthcare system. In other parts of the world, this might be completely different.

Any feedback is appreciated,

Sebastian