Larimer County - Public Health ETHOS (Electronic Tool for Health - Open Source)

Public Health ETHOS (Electronic Tool for Health – Open Source)

The Problem
Applications created and marketed to local public health departments are expensive, dependent on the continued operation of the vendor, and fragmented across the siloed delivery of public health services.  Some systems that attempt to combine most clinic services appear to be fragmented in their system design, making the overall user interface/ interaction cumbersome.  Additionally, Comprehensive systems are very expensive to acquire and maintain in an environment of reductions in funds. 

Public Health ETHOS
With software acquisition, development, and maintenance costs growing, and with the commercial applications on the market being unable to meet our needs, the Larimer County Department of Health and Environment embarked on a investigation and a total cost-of-ownership analysis to determine if we should build our own application or acquire a 3rd party system and try to adapt the missing modules and functions; we have done both in the past.  After looking at the options, if we built our own application system, after a 10 year life-cycle we would save approximately $300,000 in overall expenses.  Developing an open source system also allows us to harness the ongoing collaboration of other health departments across the U.S. 

The Project
Once we had determined we were going to build a new application we started the planning and development process for creating Pubic Health ETHOS.  This goal of this system is to create an application that can help manage the daily operations of a local public health department, and allow all agencies to develop, improve, and sustain such a system, while avoiding the expense of developing limited, proprietary, and duplicative systems. 

Our Presentation
Our presentation will discuss the project, integration points and partnerships, project management, and how local public health departments can join the development process.