FreeMED is open source practice management and electronic and computer records system. It is Episode of Care based, differing from conventional billing records. It allows the tracking of medical data, in detail, with preservation not just of the diagnosis but the reasons for medical encounters. It puts into the hands of the provicer user the ability to locally abstract outcomes data. FreeMED is freely availalbe; however professional support is available. FreeMED is released under the LGPL GNU license. FreeMED is an HIPAA compliant FOSS Practice Management System that handles billing.

FreeMED is supported entirely through the FreeMED Software Foundation, Inc, a non-profit corporation promoting the development and acceptance of FreeMED and other GPL and LGPL software from the opensource community. The Foundation is a vehicle for such development through contracting for and using grants for the cotinued development of FreeMED. The Board of Directors is responsible through the CEO for the disbursement of monies and completion of contracted or granted project work.

The Foundation is a vehicle for such development through contracting for and using grants for the continued development of FreeMED. The Board of Directors is responsible through the CEO for the disbursement of monies and completion of contracted or granted project work. FreeMED Software Foundation retains the rights for proprietary portions of software under the LGPL. Please have a look at the FreeMEDSoftware website

There are specific benefits to open source software wich differ from proprietary software. Because the code base always is freely available, this means that any skilled programmer make make or suggest modifications to the code. In this sense, the programming is continuously improved by hundreds, if not thousands of programmers who have interest in seeing that the programming is the best that it can be. Over the years more than 150 different programmers from around the world have been involved in the code for the FreeMED project. We continue to solicit and encourage people in the United States and abroad to look at, to modify and and improve the code base. Each time some one adds something to the code, say a specialty practice module, we all benefit.

A system which is free in this sense often does not make sense in the traditional business model. Since the code is 'free and freely available' anyone can use or improve the code and they have an incentive to submit those improvements to the main coding base. The term free in this context means freely available, So we mean "free" free-like-speech but the program is also "free-like-beer". The best place to learn about that is the Free Software Foundation . Take a moment to read this article. One of the goals of the free software movement has been the free and open interchange of ideas and data, taking the control of programming out of the hands of proprietary interests and putting it into the hands of the users.