OpenEMR Project Presented in Geneva

2012-07-11

I attended the Libre Software Meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting was held at the University of Geneva at the Uni Mail. The weather was great with evening temperatures in the 57-63 degree ranger. Daytime temperatures were mostly in the mid to upper 70s. Accommodations at the Tiffany Hotel were great. Geneva is in the French Speaking section of Switzerland and had many side walk cafes. One of our favorites was Cafe Remor which was visited by several event attendees

Attendance was very good. Like most of the open source conference dress code was mostly t-shirts and relaxed atmosphere. I met with Marc Geiser my RMLL2012 contact. Andreas Tille of the DebianMed Project gave a talk on standardization of Debian packages.

My talk entitled “The Growth and Development of the OpenEMR Project” covered the OpenEMR architecture. Growth, the use of Agile Development for the Meaningful Use Project, Dealing with our Federal Government, and our language translations. I wrapped up with the difficulty of getting physician’s to switch from paper records to electronic health records.

I borrowed material from Xavier Gonzalez of International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). He has a great photo of a typical paper medical record storage room. The slide tilts and makes you “dizzy” to look at the mess. I then talked about how IPPF spends a lot of time and resources just getting the clinic ready in terms of work flow to make the transition successful. The talk lasted about 30 minutes and was very well received. The Question and Answer period carried over into the hallway well past the hour.

Sam Bowen, MD
OEMR, Executive director

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