GNU Health

Inspiration

As a physician I have observed the impact of the Socioeconomic determinants of health in the population. The need for a strong and universal public health system, with strong focus on Social Medicine and solid programs on health promotion and disease prevention. I am positive health informatics can play a crucial role to provide timely and accurate demographics, clinical and epidemiological information across the nation, as well as a tool to optimize the resources of the health institutions.

What it does

The GNU Health ecosystem combines the socioeconomic determinants of health with state-of-the-art technology in bioinformatics. It manages the internal processes of a health institution, such as financial management, stock & pharmacies or laboratories (LIMS). It also provides a strong reporting/analytic functionality on demographics and epidemiology.

The GNU Health Federation allows to build large, nationwide federated networks with thousands of heterogeneous nodes. The GNU Health federation is revolutionary, and will provide the community, the health practitioners, the research institutions and the ministries of health to have much better perspective and precise information on the individuals and their context.

How I built it

GNU Health is a project that combines different technologies, but all of them Libre ("FLOSS"). Different programming languages, databases and frameworks (Python, Flask, Javascript, Tryton, VueJS, PostgreSQL, GNUPG, matplotlib...) provide the right environment and user experience for the citizen, health professional, institution or health officials at the Ministry of Health.

Challenges I ran into

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of creating a Social Project that that puts people before patients. We have build an international community, based on cooperation. Over these years, GNU Health has been deployed in many countries around the world, from institutions in the African rain forest, to very large public health hospitals in Asia, to public health systems in Latin America. GNU Health been adopted by different governments and deployed both regionally and nationwide. Our community is proud to count with scientists from international universities and research institutions, as well as programs with multi-lateral organizations such WHO to deliver Universal Health Coverage.

What I learned

Throughout these years visiting and experiencing the reality of many countries around the world, I have learned that our societies need cooperation, not competition. That investing in Open Science, Open Data and Libre Software is key. I have learned that enforcing solid public health programs are the best investment a government can do for their citizens. Finally I have learned that Dr. Rudolf Virchow was right when he said that Medicine is a Social Science, and politics is nothing else but medicine at a large scale.

What's next for GNU Health

We would love to build a pan-european GNU Health Federation network of public health and research institutions that would provide accurate and timely up-to-date demographic and health information for the whole European Union.