How to install PatientOS on Ubuntu server

Here in Brainific we are interested in the applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence in very diverse fields. Our current goal is to find out how these techniques have evolved in e-health since Mycin, and what would be the needs addressed by them. For the sake of experimentation, we decided to test an open source Health Information System (HIS).

We chose PatientOS, developed and maintained by PatientOS, Inc. It is an open source HIS that appealed to us due to several features. First of all, PatientOS relies on well-known open source technologies like PostgreSQL, JBoss or Mirth. This means that both the code and, more important, the interfaces are open, subject to inspection and extenal connections. PatientOS it also seems to be actively pushed in different fora, and supported by a company with a strong background in EMR and HIS. Finally, it follows the openEHR information model, which we think will be important in the future of health IT systems.

As we had some problems to solve in order to install this software in our servers (using Ubuntu), we want to share the installation steps we finally followed. We hope you find it useful.

1. Download PatientOS software

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/patientos/files/patientos/v1.20/patientos-12-setup.tar.gz

2. Install PostgreSQL

sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-8.4 php5-pgsql

change the password of system user created by PostgreSQL (“postgres”)

sudo passwd postgres

Connect to the database and change the password of the admin user, also called “postgres”

su postgres
psql

3. Create a postgre user to be used by PatientOS

It has to be a super user

createuser -P -h localhost -U postgres patientos_user

4. Create the PatientOS data base

createdb -E UTF8 -h localhost -U postgres patientos_db

5. Grant privileges

psql -h localhost -U postgres
postgres# GRANT ALL ON DATABASE patientos_db TO patientos_user;

On next posts we will describe how to configure the PatientOS client to access our server.

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