How is OpenGALEN relevant to you?

Whether you are a business, a terminology developer or an academic working with clinical systems, the prime benefit of OpenGALEN and GALEN is that more resources for better-quality clinical terminology will be available for you to use in your clinical systems (either at build-time, run-time, or both). We define quality as follows:

• Resources directly usable and useful for supporting the kinds of advanced clinical applications (clinical documentation, electronic health/patient records, clinical audit and management, etc) that clinical professionals are now demanding, and which are now essential to support routine day-to-day care

These are claims we have been making about GALEN technology for a long time. GALEN in any form is good for your business, because you can build a better product with it:

• You can use OpenGALEN resources to develop and manage you own local application specific terminologies as part of configuring systems at 'build time' or as part of a standards process - indeed this is the largest activity of current OpenGALEN members.
• You can use OpenGALEN as a repository of flexible terminology resource for authoring decision support and other knowledge resources
• You can use OpenGALEN resources dynamically as part of run time terminology services.

Because GALEN is open-source, the following extra benefits appear for you:

• OpenGALEN clinical terminology can be freely distributed as part of your clinical systems, with no recurring licence fees based upon use, seats, or anything else
• The OpenGALEN clinical terminology is maintainable or modifiable by anyone: either customisable locally for your own specific purposes, or, treated as a common resource, it harnesses many users who have access to its source and can contribute modifications, bug-fixes or extensions