The first beta release of FFEHR, an electronic health record application commissioned by the ASEAN+3 node of the International Open Source Network (IOSN), was released to the public last April 28, 2008. This release comes six months after the University of the Philippines Manila-National Telehealth Center tasked free/open source software (F/OSS) programmer Nathaniel Jayme and Davao-based F/OSS organization DabaweGNU, Inc. to jointly develop FFEHR.  This release marks an important milestone as the project now opens its doors for public review.

The main goal for this release is to broaden the development network of the project.  FFEHR is not yet ready for production use but it is expected that this initial release will rouse the interest of health care professionals and other developers.  The increase in beta testers should enable the project to reach stability faster through the increase in bugs reported and through some contributed patches.

FFEHR is currently developed for the Philippine health care industry. However, the project has been architectured to allow it to be easily customized for use in other countries.  FFEHR's use of Cruxade, a backend application programming interface for the Mozilla programming framework and its use of the "object oriented like" EAV database model, allows it to be adaptable.  Its extensive use of the Mozilla framework also allows it to easily scale as a network-enabled application that is available for different computing platforms. Currently, FFEHR can run as a standalone application through Xul Runner and as an extension to any Mozilla-based browser.

Licensed under the GNU GPL3, FFEHR, is available for free download and use by the public including its source code.  It can be downloaded from its project website at http://trac.afterfivetech.com/ffehr

About UNDP-IOSN
The International Open Source Network (IOSN) ASEAN+3 was established by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) initiative and is based at the University of the Philippines Manila-National Telehealth Center.