Agenda Minutes 3

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Board of Directors Meeting (telephone conference)

AGENDA

Open Source Medical Software

Friday, May 12, 2006 at 5 PM (EST), 2 PM West coast time:


1. Call to order


2. Additions to agenda


3. Go over financial and organizational status

- Form 1023 - Completed and pending approval.

- Donations - We need to plan requests for donations so that this can commence once the 501(c)(3) status is completed

- Grants

  • Collaboration with other groups increases the chances of success
  • Pat Sanchez - Women's Health Initiative, Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have spoken with Pat Sanchez who was quite helpful. I have proposed that we consider filing a joint federal grant proposal to the Bureau of Primary Health Care. With Women's Health Services as the primary recipient. She is thinking it over.
  • I have started working on a grant proposal to GlaxoSmithKline Foundation of North Carolina.
  • I have been coordinating a project with Jain Suvienay of Mumbai(Bombay) India. Jain Suveinay works for Dr. R D Lele at the Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai. Mumbai is a city of 20,000,000 people with a 48.8% indigent rate and a rate of HIV 160 x greater than the rest of India. The current idea will be to contact the World Health Organization and make a joint application with these parties.
    • Jain Suveinay is requesting a lot of features and will need a lot more money than he realizes
  • I am going to work on approaching some of the wealthier families in Hickory, NC for private donations. These private will not be as worried about whether we have a confirmed 501(c)(3) letter or whether the letter is “pending”.
  • I have working with a local grant writer who runs our cancer registry and local tumor board. She has raised enough money this year that she has given away $55,000 in local grants and has another $35,000 left over for her to forward to the national organization.

- I am beginning to actively solicit funds locally and will need a checking account soon to be able start depositing funds. I have discussed this with an attorney here locally who feels it will be safe to proceed like this. We can refer to the project as 501(c)(3) “pending”. The 501(c)(3) letter will likely arrive before the end of the year (when any of these individuals would be filing their taxes).

- I will investigate what kind of account we need with Bank Of America (as discussed last year). I will likely donate some cash personally to get this account set up.


4. Software Development - PHP 5 - MySQL 5 - User forms - Calendar - Integration of Billing inside of OpenEMR - FreeB 2 integration with OpenEMR (X12 progress) - Practice Management module that is an integral part of OpenEMR. - Cosmetic appearance * Web Designer - Thomas Yueh (CSS, Frames, Color Scheme Selection) - SVN - Migration plans to (at least) W3C HTML 4.01 transitional, and doing away with frames and smarty - future AJAX support in the framework - A discussion on a new design approach for contributed modules


5. MirrorMed – Fred Trotter (this section was discussed via e-mail conversation on 5-11-2006. These email comments will be attached to the minutes.)

- I spoke at length with Fred Trotter. He doing “his own thing” right now and considerably more latitude since the last time we spoke. Uversa's structure was a lot more like Walt Pennington. As MirrorMed he has a lot more freedom.

- He would like to see a functional merger of the OpenEMR project and MirrorMed. We discussed potential solutions. He is willing to give significant concessions. This includes using the OpenEMR name or giving the MirrorMed name to Open Source Medical Software.

- He expressed concerns about our project not having clear legal access to the OpenEMR name. Since Synitech created the name and Walt Pennington owns the copyright there is some legal risk to this using this name. The cleanest solution would be to convince Walt Pennington to give/sell the OpenEMR copyright to Open Source Medical Software. We would also need to convince Synitech to give up any legal claim to the OpenEMR brand name.

- The www.openemr.net name is currently not resolving and has not been visible for a while.

- oemr.org is number 2 on Google for searches for openemr. Try it!

- Fred Trotter prefers giving revision access to professional developers. He does not in any way want to imply any lack of confidence in our current developers. His approach to quality control has been a lot like ours.

- Advantages to a merger

  • MirrorMed is late PHP 4 and PHP 5, this is a object oriented system
  • OpenEMR still as a lot of PHP3 code. While its working it not as extensible as the newer PHP versions
  • FreeB 2 is PHP based and already working
  • Working calendaring
  • Fred Trotter has independent funding sufficient to keep him busy and allows him to work on structural aspects of the project that usual customers are not interested in funding. Like refactoring the code base. Like wise he does not represent a financially competing interest.

- Fred's suggestion would be:

  • to set up SVN access on the same site with two branches. One for OpenEMR and one for MirrorMed.
  • The current developers would have access to the entire code base.
  • Migrate the features of OpenEMR that are missing in MirrorMed to MirrorMed.
  • Build migration scripts from the old PHP3 code to allow users of older versions to migrate to the newest version.
  • Stop development on the PHP3 code except for bug fixes
  • Use the new PHP4+5 code base to build all new features.

This would greatly accelerate the conversion of OpenEMR from a PHP3 base to the newer more extensible object oriented code of PHP 4 and 5, bring FreeB 2, and have the PHP 4 + 5 calendaring.

Our conversation was relaxed with a much more collaborative feel than our previous conversation with Fred Trotter.


6. New Clients

- Part of my goals with OSMS is to greatly enlarge the client base. I have been investigating joining the NCACHA as discussed at our last meeting. As I am successful in selling groups on OpenEMR I will need hardware and software assistance from professional vendors such as Rod Roark and Peter Walter.

  • We need to discuss how to distribute new client referrals.
  • Will you guys be willing to do some gratis work for these community health centers to help get the ball rolling?
  • Does anyone know any of the other vendors and have you had any kind of feed back on their relative quality?


7. Comments period


8. Adjourn


Board of Directors Meeting (telephone conference)

MINUTES

Open Source Medical Software

Friday, May 12, 2006 at 5 PM (EST), 2 PM West coast time:


1. Call to order

Members present: Sam Bowen, Andres Paglayan, Rod Roark, Non-voting members: Peter Walter


2. Additions to agenda


3. Go over financial and organizational status

- Form 1023 - Completed and pending approval.

Peter Walter - I have worked with a lot of not-for-profit organizations in my carreer. The average time to get the 501(c)(3) letter is about 8 weeks after receipt at the IRS.

- Donations - We need to plan requests for donations so that this can commence once the 501(c)(3) status is completed

Andres Paglayan - The Womens Health Services has received a $70,000 dollar grant from the City of Santa Fe. $20,000 thousand of this money was used to purchase computer hardware including 2 IBM servers and a terrabyte memory device to support the use of OpenEMR at the Womens Health Services.

I was asked by my administration “How much would it cost to duplicate the functionality of “NextGen” using Microsoft's SQL-7? They were suggesting that they might contribute up to $100,000 dollars to improve OpenEMR.

OpenEMR needs a polished user interface, improved billing and doctors want to be able to customize their personal user interface.

- Grants

  • Collaboration with other groups increases the chances of success
  • Pat Sanchez - Women's Health Initiative, Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have spoken with Pat Sanchez who was quite helpful. I have proposed that we consider filing a joint federal grant proposal to the Bureau of Primary Health Care. With Women's Health Services as the primary recipient. She is thinking it over.
  • I have started working on a grant proposal to GlaxoSmithKline Foundation of North Carolina.
  • I have been coordinating a project with Jain Suvienay of Mumbai(Bombay) India. Jain Suveinay works for Dr. R D Lele at the Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai. Mumbai is a city of 20,000,000 people with a 48.8% indigent rate and a rate of HIV 160 x greater than the rest of India. The current idea will be to contact the World Health Organization and make a joint application with these parties.
    • Jain Suveinay is requesting a lot of features and will need a lot more money than he realizes
  • I am going to work on approaching some of the wealthier families in Hickory, NC for private donations. These private individuals will not be as worried about whether we have a confirmed 501(c)(3) letter or whether the letter is “pending”.

Sam Bowen, MD - We also expect that the 501(c)(3) letter will be received prior to the end of this tax year. I plan to ask for enough to replace the existing OSMS server. Plus enough to cover the Internet services of $238 dollars per month.

  • I have working with a local grant writer who runs our cancer registry and local tumor board. She has raised enough money this year that she has given away $55,000 in local grants and has another $35,000 left over for her to forward to the national organization.

- I am beginning to actively solicit funds locally and will need a checking account soon to be able start depositing funds. I have discussed this with an attorney here locally who feels it will be safe to proceed like this. We can refer to the project as 501(c)(3) “pending”. The 501(c)(3) letter will likely arrive before the end of the year (when any of these individuals would be filing their taxes).

- I will investigate what kind of account we need with Bank Of America (as discussed last year). I will likely donate some cash personally to get this account set up.

Peter Walter - Sam, why worry about all this small stuff? The people that I know know find it easier to ask for the whole amount of what they need from just one funder. My sister-in-law does a lot of fund raising through grants. She doesn't usually ask for less than $150,000. She is quite successful at this. I will talk to her and try to get some ideas.


4. Software Development - PHP 5 - MySQL 5 - User forms - Calendar - Integration of Billing inside of OpenEMR - FreeB 2 integration with OpenEMR (X12 progress) - Practice Management module that is an integral part of OpenEMR. - Cosmetic appearance * Web Designer - Thomas Yueh (CSS, Frames, Color Scheme Selection) - SVN - Migration plans to (at least) W3C HTML 4.01 transitional, and doing away with frames and smarty - future AJAX support in the framework - A discussion on a new design approach for contributed modules


5. MirrorMed – Fred Trotter (this section was discussed via e-mail conversation on 5-11-2006. These email comments will be attached to the minutes.)

- I spoke at length with Fred Trotter. He doing “his own thing” right now and considerably more latitude since the last time we spoke. Uversa's structure was a lot more like Walt Pennington. As MirrorMed he has a lot more freedom.

- He would like to see a functional merger of the OpenEMR project and MirrorMed. We discussed potential solutions. He is willing to give significant concessions. This includes using the OpenEMR name or giving the MirrorMed name to Open Source Medical Software.

- He expressed concerns about our project not having clear legal access to the OpenEMR name. Since Synitech created the name and Walt Pennington owns the copyright there is some legal risk to this using this name. The cleanest solution would be to convince Walt Pennington to give/sell the OpenEMR copyright to Open Source Medical Software. We would also need to convince Synitech to give up any legal claim to the OpenEMR brand name.

- The www.openemr.net name is currently not resolving and has not been visible for a while.

- oemr.org is number 2 on Google for searches for openemr. Try it!

- Fred Trotter prefers giving revision access to professional developers. He does not in any way want to imply any lack of confidence in our current developers. His approach to quality control has been a lot like ours.

- Advantages to a merger

  • MirrorMed is late PHP 4 and PHP 5, this is a object oriented system
  • OpenEMR still as a lot of PHP3 code. While its working it not as extensible as the newer PHP versions
  • FreeB 2 is PHP based and already working
  • Working calendaring
  • Fred Trotter has independent funding sufficient to keep him busy and allows him to work on structural aspects of the project that usual customers are not interested in funding. Like refactoring the code base. Like wise he does not represent a financially competing interest.

- Fred's suggestion would be:

  • to set up SVN access on the same site with two branches. One for OpenEMR and one for MirrorMed.
  • The current developers would have access to the entire code base.
  • Migrate the features of OpenEMR that are missing in MirrorMed to MirrorMed.
  • Build migration scripts from the old PHP3 code to allow users of older versions to migrate to the newest version.
  • Stop development on the PHP3 code except for bug fixes
  • Use the new PHP4+5 code base to build all new features.

This would greatly accelerate the conversion of OpenEMR from a PHP3 base to the newer more extensible object oriented code of PHP 4 and 5, bring FreeB 2, and have the PHP 4 + 5 calendaring.

Our conversation was relaxed with a much more collaborative feel than our previous conversation with Fred Trotter.

Rod Roark - Regarding MirrorMed, I think it would be great for it to become affiliated with OSMS, much as OpenEMR is. My opinion on this is mostly based on the openness of the project as espoused by Fred.

However I really don't get this talk about merger. What's the point? As already noted, the OpenEMR name is encumbered and so is not especially valuable. And there are OpenEMR users who will probably never be interested in hassling with a migration -- perhaps they have made customizations and/or are have no incentive to change.

Seems like Fred's suggestion for migrating features from OpenEMR into MirrorMed may be a fine one, but why is he trying to talk us into doing that when he has the funding for it and we do not? He should just do it. In the meantime I have clients who want to pay me to work on OpenEMR, and nobody wanting to pay me to work on MirrorMed.

I am not very impressed with all the trash-talking about the OpenEMR code base. It does work, and with the possible exception of the Smarty layers is quite easy to understand and modify.

Re FreeB2 migration, the A/R part needs to be addressed. Currently OpenEMR works pretty well with SQL-Ledger, and last I heard FreeB2 does not support it and does not provide an alternative.

Aside from all the above, I think the lack of technical detail in these "merger" discussions is scary. I would hate to see anyone committing to something like this based on the superficial level of the talk so far.

For me, the decision to merge the code or not needs a justification that is 99% technical. For you it seems more like "let's agree in principle and then run it by the technical guys to see if they have any problems with it".

OK that's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I hope you see the point.

Rod

Peter Walter - I am in the uncomfortable situation of not having (yet) made any significant code contribution to OpenEMR, and therefore I defer to those who have *actually* contributed. However, before deciding which open-source EMR product to support, I looked carefully at a number of commercial products, and at the open-source competition, including ClearHealth. My assessment was that OpenEMR was the most functional open-source product available, and I still feel that way. Yes, some of the competition is more compatible with newer technologies and approaches - but I didn't particularly like the design methodology of ClearHealth.

My view is that discussions about mergers, etc. should certainly go ahead - but that we should concentrate our available resources on updating OpenEMR, as the design now is, to use (or support the use) of the latest versions of HTML, MySQL, and PHP. It seems to me that the effort to do that is far less than merging OpenEMR with another framework, and can be done incrementally. After we do that, we can talk about merging / sharing code with another EMR as practicable.

Rod - However I really don't get this talk about merger. What's the point? As Fred Trotter has already noted, the OpenEMR name is encumbered

Peter Walter - Rod, what do you mean by "the OpenEMR name is encumbered" ?

Rod Roark - I mean that Walt Pennington has trademarked it. Also he used to have the domain name openemr.net but a whois lookup suggests that he may have sold it. Other people own openemr.com and openemr.org.

Peter Walter - Then, one agenda item I would like to discuss is changing our name to one that can be trademarked by us as a non-commercial, non-profit organization. It is important that we have control over the name of our "product".

In addition to the items Sam mentioned, additional (technical) agenda items I would like to discuss are:

a) Migration plans to (at least) W3C HTML 4.01 transitional, and doing away with frames and smarty b) future AJAX support in the framework c) A discussion on a new design approach for contributed modules

Sam Bowen - Agreed. One avenue would be to contact Walt and find out how dear he holds this name (ie how much he wants for the name.) Peter Walter - Yes, but the name is really useless without the domain - and Walt does not control the .com or .org domain (per Rod). I think if we put our heads together we could come up with a new, unencumbered name and domain. It will only cost us some brainpower and minor branding changes. Sam Bowen - In reference to ClearHealth – MirrorMed, Peter, you had mentioned “the emperor has no clothes?” Peter Walter - In My Humble Opinion what OpenEMR has that Fred does not have (and wants) is *functionality* and an *installed base*. I still don't clearly understand the "advantages" to us of a merger, but I am willing to listen. Without minimizing the technical effort, I don't think it is that difficult to migrate the (mostly) php3 code of OpenEMR to current php techniques, and object-orientation, etc. could be "overlaid" on top of the existing code base as time progresses. I have already done some rudimentary work on that. One area that I think we need improvement on is getting lesser-technical people involved to write documentation, create custom modules, etc., and we need to improve the framework so they can do so. For instance, adding context-sensitive "help" functions that would display documentation and tutorials in a help window - perhaps hosted at the OSMS site, and kept up to date through a wiki or other editable page system. In short, we need to get other,s involved - so those of us who can cut code can concentrate on doing so.

In the software development world, functionality always wins. I just don't think it will be that hard to convert the PHP 3 to modern PHP 5 code.

Sam Bowen - Whois currently lists "The Possibility Forge, Inc." as the owner of the openemr.net. The Possibility Forge apparently assists persons or companies in developing new software. Openemr.com is some type of commercial program searching the internet for ways to spend money. Openemr.org is owned by a private individual for some future plans that may or may not bring fruition. This is largely how we came up with oemr.org (Rod's idea) in the first place. The main problem with "branding changes" is the issue of branding in the first place. The longer and harder you have worked on the existing brand kinda "goes out the window". Synitech the creators of OpenEMR are still marketing their version 2.0 on their web page.

Peter Walter - This strengthens the argument for a branding change, because of the potential confusion.

Sam Bowen - I have seen sites stating that OpenEMR is the most widely installed open source EMR available. Currently Google has 28,100 references to OpenEMR. All of of this would simply go away with a single mouse click. Especially on the Internet re-branding is especially difficult.

Peter Walter - Not necessarily. We could continue to reference the same "openemr" for search engine purposes, with a statement that the open-source product had been rebranded. Rebranding on the Internet isn't difficult at all - in my commercial work, I do it all the time.

Sam Bowen - Currently the OpenEMR name is not defensible, at least not by us. If we do go with a name change it is always less painful to do it earlier instead of later. Certainly the growing popularity of the oemr.org site would assist in this type of change. We could market this as "The Next Generation of OpenEMR is SomeNewName". The downside to this is all of the current marketing will help Synitech.

Peter Walter - Well, right now, Synitech is benefiting from the name confusion, already!

Sam Bowen - The option is to track down the other owners and try to convince them one or another to give us access to the OpenEMR name in an unencumbered fashion. It is hard to say which will be the least difficult road. Peter Walter - Based upon my commercial experience, this would be extremely difficult, with a almost certain likelihood of failure. Besides, even if we got *one* of the domains, the others would still cause branding confusion, and the confusion with Synitech would still exist. I really think our efforts are best directed at acquiring our own .com/.net/.org address - .com for (perhaps) a future for-profit arm, .org for the open-source project, and .net for a non-technical "community" site related to the project


6. New Clients

- Part of my goals with OSMS is to greatly enlarge the client base. I have been investigating joining the NCACHA as discussed at our last meeting. As I am successful in selling groups on OpenEMR I will need hardware and software assistance from professional vendors such as Rod Roark and Peter Walter.

  • We need to discuss how to distribute new client referrals.
  • Will you guys be willing to do some gratis work for these community health centers to help get the ball rolling?
  • Does anyone know any of the other vendors and have you had any kind of feed back on their relative quality?
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