OSCAR McMaster


OSCAR McMaster is a web-based electronic medical record system initially developed for academic primary care clinics. It has grown into a comprehensive EMR and billing system used by many doctor's offices and private medical clinics in Canada and other parts of the world. The name is derived from where it was created and an acronym; OSCAR stands for Open Source Clinical Application and Resource and McMaster refers to McMaster University, where it was developed. It enables the delivery of evidence resources at the point of care.
Since December 1, 2005, OSCAR McMaster had received successive certifications by OntarioMD under the Physician IT Program. OSCAR McMaster version 15 has also achieved ISO 13485:2003 certification, and has met the requirements of the latest OntarioMD Specification 4.1A. On September 30, 2012, OSCAR McMaster v12 product received Pre-implementation Certification for Jurisdiction Class, Laboratory and Clinical Documents, Electronic Medical Record. As of May 3, 2016, OSCAR is the only open-source Clinical Management System product to meet/exceed the requirements that ensure the product supports defined standards for clinical and practice management software and is currently holding twenty percent of the market share.

Components of OSCAR

OSCAR has many features which computerize and coordinate the important functions of a medical clinic.
oscarEncounter is the patient's electronic medical record. It contains all of the patient's medical information, including patient history, progress notes, forms and documents.
oscarRx is the OSCAR prescription program, which allows you to create electronic prescriptions, save personalized prescription information, and stay informed about possible drug interactions and allergy conflicts for each patient. Prescription printing on label printers is supported, as are "wet" signatures placed on electronic prescriptions using external signature pads.
oscarBilling is an integrated billing module that supports automated billing submission in the provinces of ON and BC.
oscarDocument, a system for attaching any type of file to a patient's chart.
CAISI, an award-winning case management, bed management and program facility management system used by several agencies in Toronto, Hamilton and Ottawa. The system is specifically designed to share relevant patient information among providers, while maintaining the highest levels of patient privacy.
OSCAR Integration : able to seamlessly integrate electronic patient information between separate EMR installations including seamless patient controlled integration of progress notes, practice membership, medication information, prevention information and ability to make electronic referrals between clinics.

Features

OSCAR is primarily written in JavaServer Pages and served via the Apache Tomcat servlet container. The backend storage is a MySQL database, and the interface layer between Java and MySQL is Hibernate. Most installations are performed on a Linux server. OSCAR is installed on a different machine than the one it is used on, in a server-client configuration.

Support Resources

Being an open source project, much of the support for OSCAR is obtained from the community, through mailing lists. The most active mailing list is oscarmcmaster-bc-users, with advanced topics happening in oscar-advanced-users.
Commercial support is also offered by office OSCAR Service Providers, or OSPs. Certain OSPs employ full-time development staff to maintain the code and to include proprietary features for their clients so end user physician can be locked into a particular provider although the basic code is open source. With OSCAR 15, proprietary code will be merged into the main trunk in accordance with the GPL license.