Grant Application
One word sentence to describe Open Source Medical Software:
Open Source Medical Software is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to improving free open source medical software and distributing this software to needy populations thereby improving patient outcomes and positively affecting health care world wide. (Incorporated in the State of North Carolina 3-15-2005).
Three Points you want people to remember about OpenEMR:
OpenEMR (Open Electronic Medical Record) is the primary program supported by Open Source Medical Software.
OpenEMR is a free open source software that is already being used world wide to positively impact patient care.
Our intention is to improve health care by reducing barriers to care, including economic barriers, cultural barriers, and language barriers to improve health outcomes in traditionally disadvantaged populations.
1. What is our specific grant request (the amount and for what project)?
Open Source Medical Software respectfully requests $2,500 dollars to be applied toward the purchase of a new Internet web server.
2. Who is our organization? What is its mission and brief history? Whom should the funder contact (name, address, phone number, and e-mail)?
Open Source Medical Software (OSMS) is a North Carolina not-for-profit corporation chartered on March 15, 2005. OSMS was organized to fund the development of and to distribute OpenEMR, a free open source electronic health record. OpenEMR was originally developed by Synitech in June of 2001 and subsequently released as open source under the GNU General Public License. Since its initial release, OpenEMR has undergone a lot of changes and had many new features added. OpenEMR is now being used in medical practices in most of the United States with installations in Australia, Sweden, India, Nepal, Kenya, Holland, and Israel. Open Source Medical Software (OSMS) provides equal technological access to people who are typically considered to be at a socioeconomic disadvantage and improves the quality of health care those people receive. The mission of Open Source Medical Software is to help physicians provide high quality medical care to all people regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or geographic location by giving medical practices and clinics across the globe access to medical software free of charge. Our focus is on providing free, high-quality medical software to rural health centers, county health departments, urban clinics, and other medical practices that are committed to treating the disadvantaged.
Dr. Samuel T. Bowen is the director and president of the Board of Directors of Open Source Medical Software. Dr. Bowen can be contacted at 1470 9th Avenue Drive NE, Hickory, North Carolina, 28601. His telephone number is 1-828-325-0950, facsimile 1-828-325-0248 and e-mail address is [email protected].
3. What is the community need that our organization, and specifically our project, addresses? What statistics and stories can we use to substantiate that need?
Electronic health records (EHRs) allow fewer people to do more with less. This is especially true for organizations operating on limited budgets. Instead of hiring another staffer to file papers, the clinic might be able to provide free blood pressure medicines or hire a nurse who can do blood pressures checks for less compliant patients. Electronic health records allow cross-checking of drugs for known interactions. Electronic faxing or e-mailing prescriptions improves legibility and decreases communication errors between the physician and the pharmacist. Less storage space is needed for EHRs, decreasing the need for a larger building, resulting in decreased rent or building costs.
EHRs allow the introduction of computer-assisted diagnostics. Improved diagnoses translates into fewer "blind alleys," reduced empiric medication trials, and fewer opportunities for treatment errors. All of these effects will reduce physician anxiety over lawsuits and encourage participation of high quality physicians. EHRs help improve patient care in many ways and reduce costs at the same time. This ultimately lowers the barriers to high quality patient care.
The Institute of Medicine reported in 1999 that between 44,000 to 98,000 deaths occur annually from medical errors. In a year in which the CDC reported 2.4 million deaths, Barbara Starfield reported in JAMA (Volume 284, No. 4, 2000) that the estimates were even higher, citing a total of 225,000 deaths due to iatrogenic causes (injuries caused by medical treatment), which would place health-caused deaths as the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA. Medication errors, misdiagnosis, and "blind alleys" are a big problem in the United States and in the world.
4. How does our project OpenEMR address the need? What methods will we use? How many people will we serve or involve?
Open Source Medical Software is supplying the OpenEMR program free of charge to community health associations, rural health clinics, and public health clinics. These organizations depend on public funding and are chronically starved for cash. Few can afford the commercial electronic health records that charge between $15,000 and $75,000 per physician for these programs.
OpenEMR provides excellent legibility. Typed prescriptions are faxed or e-mailed to the pharmacist decreasing the risk of misread prescriptions. There is drug interaction checking available through on-line databases through OpenEMR decreasing the likelihood of a medical injury occurring because of an interaction between two or more drugs (drug-drug interaction). The Open Source Medical Software team of developers are planning improved drug-drug interaction checking, computer assisted diagnosis, and well-person health screening using an evidence-based medicine approach.
Currently, Open Source Medical Software runs on-line installation and trouble shooting assistance. This assistance operates about 16 hours per day and is available practically 365 days a year. OpenEMR is currently being used in many areas of the United States, Australia, Sweden, Holland, India, Nepal, and Kenya. The program is currently being translated in Spanish, Swedish, and German. Recently volunteers have stepped forward in the Netherlands and Israel to assist with translation into Dutch and Hebrew.
The impact of OpenEMR over its relatively short existence has clearly exceeded the imagination of its creators by a wide margin. Dr. Bowen is currently working on plans to improve awareness of this program and improve availability to disadvantaged clinics in our area in Western North Carolina.
5. What are the project's measurable goals or outcomes.
The number of clinics using OpenEMR is difficult to measure. The projects has 700 downloads a month of the OpenEMR program. Many of these are curious users who may never get the program installed or working correctly. Open Source Medical Software has implemented a series of questionnaires to better quantify the number of clinics, users, and affected patients using the OpenEMR system.
It is the goal of OSMS to measure these installations periodically to track how many persons are benefiting from the use of this software. OSMS is also seeking partners in computer science among Duke University, UNC Chapel Hill, and NCSU to develop ways of measuring the impact of introducing the OpenEMR program on public health.
6. What is our time line and work plan? Have we included everything from planning to evaluation?
7. Who are the key volunteers and staff on this project? What are their qualifications? How much of their time will be spent on this particular project?
The key volunteers of the OpenEMR project include our board of directors:
Samuel T. Bowen, MD 144 38th Ave NW Hickory, North Carolina 28601
Dr. Bowen is a medical doctor, licensed in 1987. He has been practicing in primary care, urgent care, and emergency medicine. He has been working with electronic media for storage of medical information since 1998. He is the owner and manager of a primary care facility with 14 employees.
Dr. Bowen volunteers for Open Source Medical Software and spends about 15 hours per week administering Open Source Medical Software, administering the organization’s web pages (www.openmedsoftware.org and www.oemr.org) , and helping users learn to install and operate OpenEMR in on-line forums.
Rod Roark
Sunset Systems
3122 Evergreen Dr.
Fairfield, California 94533
Rod Roark is the owner of Sunset Systems in Fairfield, California. He has worked full time in software development since 1984. He has extensive experience in the development of successful commercial software, including: multi-user operating system development, e-commerce website offering custom built computers, website offering live multi-player backgammon, local area network system administration, awarded for technical excellence by PC Magazine, multi-user graphical client for playing contract bridge over the Internet, stock market analysis and charting system for institutional investors, source library maintenance system, and has been a major contributor to OpenEMR, an open source medical records and practice management system.
Mr. Roark is experienced with MS Windows (NT, 95, 98, 2000, XP), Linux, HP-UX, BSDI, Mac OS, Netware, Apache web server, Sybase, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Servlet/JSP engines, TCP/IP, Samba, IBM mainframes and has used the following programming languages: C. C++, Java, HTML, JavaScript/DOM, SQL, XML, JSP, ASP, Perl, PHP, Assembler languages, UML, Bash, JDBC, FMC, and STL.
Rod Roark volunteers with Open Source Medical Software. He intermittently assists Dr. Bowen with the organization’s web server and spends 10-15 hours per week communicating with users on how to install and operate EMR.
Rod Roark develops new features for OpenEMR professionally when contracted to do so from members of his client list. He spends 40-50 hours a week on this development. These features are released to the project free of charge under the Free Software Foundation General Public License.
Andres M. V. Paglayan
15 Camino Esperanza
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87507
Andres Paglayan is the health data analyst and information technology director of Women’s’ Health Services of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He works as a consultant for the Supreme Court of New Mexico Judicial Information Division and is an instructor in PHP and MySQL web application programming at the University of New Mexico. He has worked with computers and local area networks since 1996. He is primarily self-trained. He has worked with DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Linux. He has experience programming in PHP, PERL, C, MySQL, Microsoft Access, and Adabas.
Andres Paglayan volunteers with Open Source Medical Software. He spends 10-15 hours communicating with users on how to install and operate OpenEMR. He intermittently develops new features for OpenEMR which he releases to the project free of charge under the Free Software Foundation General Public License. Mr. Paglayan has been active in promoting OpenEMR in New Mexico in an effort to receive public funds for the Women’s Health Services of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Women’s Health Services of Santa Fe, New Mexico is a not-for-profit organization which provides free health services for 14,000 women in Santa Fe.
James E. Perry, Jr. 11201 Poplar Grove Court Laurel, MD 20708
James Perry has been working as a software developer since 1987. He has extensive experience with database application with expertise in the following areas: Oracle Certified Application Developer in Oracle Financials, e-Business Suite applications including customized Oracle Financials (GL, AP, PO, AR, Assets, and PA), Oracle HRMS/Payroll modules and associated custom applications. He has a strong background in Database Administration, PL/SQL, interfaces, SQL, Java, and the Oracle Developer toolset.
He has development experience with Oracle 8i/9i/10g, Oracle Federal Financials, Oracle 11i, Developer/2000, Designer 6i/9i, Unix/Linux, Forms 4.5/6i/9i, Unix Shell Scripting, Delphi, Pascal, Reports 2.5/6i, Win32/eVC++, COBOL, PL/SQL, SQL, C/C++, Java, PHP, Visual Basic, LISP, Oracle Financials 10.7SC-11.x, Erwin, and Rational ClearCase.
James Perry volunteers with Open Source Medical Software. He spends 10-15 hours communicating with users on how to install and operate OpenEMR. He intermittently develops features for OpenEMR that he releases to the project free of charge under the Gnu Public License.
Other key volunteers include:
8. What is our projected cost and what are our sources of revenue? How will the project be sustained after the grant period?
9. What other organizations in the community are providing similar programs or projects? How is ours different? How do we work together with the other providers?
10. Why is ours the right organization to launch this program, buy this item, or whatever it is we are proposing?
11. How will our program be evlauated, how often, and by whom? What will the evaluation process do for the program- will it help us adjust the program, replicate it in other cities, or plan in other ways?
12. Who and how many will benefit?
13. Why are we approaching this funder at this time?
14. How can we best thank the funder for their generosity and consideration?
15. What attachments will we be including?
