// the find
informatici/openhospital
OH - Open Hospital is a free and open-source Electronic Health Record (EHR) software application. This repository is used to build its releases.
This is the build/release repo for Open Hospital, a Java-based Electronic Health Record system used in low-resource clinical settings, mostly in Africa and parts of Asia. It's not the application itself — it's Makefiles and CI that stitch together the core, GUI, API, and doc repos into portable/client-server installers. Relevant to devs interested in healthcare IT, humanitarian tech, or Java desktop apps rather than people looking for a library to drop into their own project.
The distributed-repo structure (core/gui/doc/api/ui split) keeps business logic separate from the Swing UI, which is why a REST API and React frontend could be bolted on later without rewriting the domain layer. Real production history — this has been running in actual hospitals for over a decade, not a hobby project. The Makefile-driven build with parallel targets (make -j4) and documented intermediate targets makes it easy to build just the piece you need instead of the whole distribution. GPLv3 with an active Jira and Slack means the governance and contribution path are real, not decorative.
Java Swing for the GUI is a hard sell in 2026 — anyone evaluating this for its UI patterns is looking at a dead-end stack, and the newer React UI and REST API are both marked WIP with no clear timeline. Build instructions assume a specific Linux toolchain (JDK 8+, Maven, asciidoctor-pdf) with no containerized build path, so reproducing a release build outside CI takes real setup work. Documentation is scattered across a separate doc repo, a wiki, and Jira rather than living with the code, which makes it hard to know what's current. This repo itself has almost no code to read — it's just packaging, so evaluating the actual EHR logic means cloning openhospital-core separately.