OpenEMR Grows in Popularity

As of 11-30-2012 there have been 198,042 downloads from the SourceForge project page. There have been an additional 10,000 downloads from the OEMR web site for a total of about 210,000 downloads. We estimate based on the number of companies that support OpenEMR that there are 5-10,000 medical facilities in United States. This represents about 30,000 practitioners using OpenEMR and 60,000,000 people being cared for using this EHR. only 35% of the users of OpenEMR are in the United States. World wide this represents 115,000 practitioners and 240,000,000 persons being benefited from this software.

Sam Bowen, MD

Going From Paper to Electronic: A Road Map

OHSU graduate Student Diane Peterson has successfully completed a Biomedical Informatics internship with OEMR with Sam Bowen, MD as her preceptor and Tony McCormick as advisor. Diane Peterson worked with a small one physician office in Portland, Oregon and has successfully converted them from a paper office to using OpenEMR as their EHR. While doing this Diane Peterson carefully documented the process creating a written road map so that others might follow her path. The road map is on the wiki and is excerpted here:

“While there are a number of consulting companies that will guide an installation and implementation of OpenEMR for ambulatory care clinics, it is possible to plan and execute the process of converting a paper office to a working instance of OpenEMR. This roadmap is a step by step approach, written from the perspective of an actual implementation of OpenEMR in a small, one practitioner internal medicine clinic. The clinic used as a model decided to maintain all records in house as well as the responsibility to ensure compliance with security requirements. Every clinic is different, therefore this manual is written from a general viewpoint which is scalable to a larger organization.

This documentation was prepared as a student internship project as part of the requirements for a Masters of Biomedical Informatics degree.”

Read more:

Going From Paper to Electronic, by Diane Peterson

Laboratory Information Project has started!

The Laboratory Information System has been officially been started. Work is being funded by Bowen Primary & Urgent Care, MI-Squared, Visolve and a number of private contributions from 4 different laboratories.

The CPOE order entry system is being worked on by Rod Roark and Visolve.

The laboratory results and messaging system is being worked on by Jeremy Wallace.

Visolve is starting on the analyzer interfaces and the logs necessary for medium and high complexity laboratories.

Sam Bowen, MD

OpenEMR chosen in the Bahamas.

Hello

I am in the Bahamas and have just setup Open EMR for my cousin who is opening a new clinic.

I am very impressed with the software.

I will continue to evaluate and jot down any ideas that ome to mind.

Thank you for a wonderful software package.

Samuel Strachan
citixens.com/openemr

J. Samuel Strachan
Team Lead, Systems Architecture and Administration
The CitiXens Team
242.427.2060 or 242.376.6567
http://citixens.com/helpdesk

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

Southern Tier Plastic Surgery Associates, PC selects OpenEMR

Dr Bowen:

I just wanted to let you know that my medical practice has just started
using OpenEMR as our EHR system.

We are a two surgeon plastic surgery practice in upstate New York. Our
patient database contains approximately 50,000 patients. We are using
MI Squared for hosting and support.

I am a long time fan of the Linux operating system, and FOSS. I am glad
that such a high-quality product exists for EHR implementation. Though
we have just started using the system, we are quite happy with it, and I
recommend it to my colleagues who are looking at EHR systems. Many of
them have a hard time understanding that such a product is available for
free, while other systems cost over $40,000! I tell them that for that
much money, their EHR system should be delivered in a brand new BMW,
that they get to keep!

Anyway, thanks again for all the work you have put into developing the
system, and for its continuing development.

Sincerely,

Mark S. Anthony, MD, FACS
Southern Tier Plastic Surgery Associates, PC