Is Care2x the hospital information management HIS dead or abandoned?
What is Care2x?
Care2x is an open source hospital information management system (HIS), It has been released first time in 2002, and gain the attention of end-users around the world for ease of installation as it supports multiple platforms, configuration and simple user-interface which comes with language switcher that supports multiple languages.
Care2x was built to manage hospitals with a set of powerful tools that makes it more like enterprise resources planning solution (ERP), despite the user-interface Care2x has pretty good functionalities and tools which make it usable in hospitals. I have been used in several hospitals till now, Yes till now, Care2x has been used in several hospitals in Africa.
Care2x has a mailing list of about 700 members, therefore we can consider that a community, It had been translated to 24 languages by that community. Yet it has/ had poor support.
Care2x got many forks over the past ten years, as TurnHos, CARE3G, and Sinapsis HIS. Well these children projects even though they try to solve and upgrade Care2x to next stage, They seem to have inherited the poor community skills as their parent. There is no working websites, community channels, or proper demos online.
Care2x is stuck at version 2.7-alpha since : 2015-11-29 ( Last Update ) - source
Care2x features
Medical records management
Care2x has advanced medical record management, including easy search and complete CRUD( created, read, update, & delete ), backed by permissions.
Flow Management
Clinical flow management, including admission, ward management, medication and diagnostic reporting.
Nursing management
Nursing operation and flow management has been introduced in the first versions of Care2x, which ease the nursing operations including ward management, patient monitoring, inward monitoring, nursing wards, nursing forum and memo organizer to assign tasks for nurses.
Nursing management sections include one-click access for patient record to reach a specific document for a patient including medication report, lab report and diagnostic reports. With access to doctor directory.
Doctors management
Doctors management section in Care2x has provided the medical hospital staff with very useful tools to manage doctor records with very advanced duty planner. Doctors directory, an internal forum for communication, news board, and memo
Department management
Creating a new department, assigning staff is a major part of any hospital information system. I remember when many HIS software ( commercial ones, and open source ones ) were struggling to create a presentation for department/ staff/ operation management, Care2x came out with an integrated presentation to solve the issue.
Pharmacy Management
Pharmacy management including inventory tracker, a search module, billing module, and reporting.
What else does Care2x provide :
Depo management to manage stocks, Laboratory management, Directory management with advanced search, News management including internal news section for every active department, Email management for the staff including internet email management by the integrated mail client.
Care2x has utilized many tools to provide support of the dynamic process inside every department in the hospital including planners, calendar, duty planner for the staff, forums with internal forum configuration for every department, mail and messaging to ensure easy open communication between hospital staff and departments and even webcam integration and CCTV.
Care2x was great HIS " Hospital Information System".
I would recommend Care2x to anyone planning to see the meaning of HIS ( Hospital Information System ). Care2x has provided a fine example to be more than record management solution as it solves the dynamic process and introduced communication and informative channels for the staff. Which we have rarely seen in any HIS software.
Care2x has solved integration and information exchange issues for staff and departments integrated within it's core.
What is happening now?
Care2x has not been updated since 2015, soon as version 2.7 was placed to download on source forge, There hasn't been any update since The issue tracker has been disabled at SourceForge. There were about 180 tickets. It still getting weekly downloads ( this week it was about 77 downloads).
Yet there is no official statistics or real numbers about the current users and active installations. Which make us wonder about the current situation of Care2x is it dead or abandoned?
Is Care2x dead or abandoned?
Well, no one really knows, The website has not been updated for years, there are open issues at GitHub without any response, There is no more information about the users are they stuck with the alpha version for years.
There is complete radio salience regarding Care2x from the core developers.
What does Care2x require!
- Codebase and UI upgrade or rebuild from scratch. Care2x does not fit the current standards and running technologies. Security is a concern so as running old build of code with unsolved bugs is risky enough for the sensitive records the system manages.
What do the customers need?
Many customers/ users may feel stuck with Care2x, Though many may think it does the job, well, it does, Though plans have to be made, unfortunately, It's hard to get a hold of the core developers and understand will the project continue or not. However, Save your data" and plan to move on to community-supported open source HIS that receive regular updates and upgrades from its developers and community.
