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.