Sunday, September 12, 2010

GNUmed in Debian and Ubuntu - when software becomes critical to your health

Both Debian and Ubuntu are about to release now versions of their respective distributions. Both include GNUmed, an electronic medical record. Previous releases never really shiped a fitting candidate for people to try out. This time we opted to provide a well tested version. But it turns out that a bug was found that had the potential to cause some serious medical trouble such as allergic reactions.

At this point both distributions were frozen to be further stabilized and no updates are allowed during that period to avoid introducing new bugs. However because of the severity of the problem we asked both the Debian people and the Ubuntu people to make and exception and include a fixed version of GNUmed.

Both camps agreed that this was the best option and included an updated version of GNUmed into their software repositories. Well done.

Sebastian Hilbert, MD

1 comment:

sallyhealthcaretech said...

I like that GNUmed will be available on open source platforms. This is very important and shows a non-biaas towards operating systems on the part of GNUmed.