5 of the Best Free Linux Medical Practice Management Software

Medical Practice Management Software (MPMS) is a type of software that is designed to supervise and support the day-to-day operations of a medical practice.

This category of software typically offers functionality such as data entry, scheduling appointments, billing, reporting, records management, the generation of reports, accounting, and capturing patient demographics.

There is often an overlap between MPMS software and Electronic Medical Records systems (EMR). In some cases, a single software application offers both MPMS and EMR functionality.

However, there are fundamental differences between the two. Whilst MPMS concentrates on administrative and financial matters, an EMR typically represents an element of a local standalone health information system.

Unfortunately, there is not a huge range of open source MPMS available to choose from. Some interesting projects not featured below but still worthy of a mention are MirrorMed and Open Dental. MirrorMed is a fork of ClearHealth.

Open Dental is a Mono project for dental practices. However, neither application currently can be warmly recommended.

In the case of Open Dental, the software is being actively maintained and has a great feature set, but support for Linux has been dropped. In the case of MirrorMed, development has ground to a halt.

This is the third article in our series covering open source medical software. Our earlier medical articles focused on Electronic Medical Records systems and Medical Imaging software.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 5 hot free Linux Medical Practice Management software.

Now, let's explore the 5 practice management applications at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.

Medical Practice Management
ClearHealth	Designed by clinics and hospitals, it is a fully comprehensive system
iHRIS Suite	Track and manage health care workers across a country
FreeMED	Full featured EMR and MPMS package
OpenEMR	Used by medical practitioners in many countries
Care2x	Hospital information system/practice management system