Important Contributors and Volunteers

7. Who are the key volunteers and staff on this project, and what are their qualifications? How much of their time will be spent on this particular project?

The software development project will be put out for bids from the following companies. The software development estimate is 250 hours, approximately 6 weeks. Contacting the companies as well as the mental health associations and organizations will be done by mail and email.

Companies

Clinic Doctor (cassilup), a commercial reseller, has a live, built-in patient portal. They agreed to contribute a version of that portal that would run entirely inside OpenEMR and meet the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Meaningful Use criteria. [1]

Ensoftek (DrCloudEMR) is a Portland, Oregon company that maintains about 100 developers is a contractor for Microsoft Corporation and the U.S. government. This company contributed development work on the clinical decision rules, automated measure calculations, patient reminders, clinical quality measure reporting and immunization register reporting. [2]

Garden State Health Systems (GSHS) is a small New Jersey IT company that makes Health Information Exchange its primary business. GSHS contributed expertise and programmers to develop the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) and Continuity of Care Document (CCD) core modules that allow OpenEMR to meet many of the certification criteria around patient medical records sharing, both with the patients and with referrals. [3]

Medical Information Integration (MI2) is a small Portland, Oregon based company with 4 developers. The Chief Information Officer, Tony McCormick, contributed overall project management for the ONC Certification. Additionally, staff from MI2 contributed significant sections of the clinical rules, clinical quality measures, automated measure calculations, patient reminders, document encryption and integrity modules. MI2 contributed work to the Laboratory Exchange Network and has contributed the OpenEMR User Guides. [4]

MRSB, LLC provided a lawyer, Greg Neumann, to coordinate the OEMR 501(c)(3) work. This allowed OEMR to contract with the certification body (ICSA Laboratories) without which we would not be registered or certified as an open source project. [5]

Phyaura is a Tampa, Florida based company which does custom development work on OpenEMR and which contributed code to help integrate RxNorm and SNOMED coding requirements used in CCR, CCD, and in clinical quality reporting. [6]

Sunset Systems is a Fairfield, California based company. Rod Roark, the principle, has been the longest, currently active, contributor to the project. Mr. Roark developed the framework of the laboratory results and made major contributions in terms of code review and integration of new software as the ONC Certification project progressed. [7]

ViCare+ is based in Coimbatore, India. An open source software development company, this team has been the mainstay of the OpenEMR certification project. ViCare+ performed the original gap analysis at the start of the certification project and worked as the sole formal Quality Assurance group. This group is expert at interpreting the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Health IT testing criteria and working out what needed to be adjusted, fixed or redone to make certification possible. Their team developed all of the required security modules (password policies, audit logging, client certificates, emergency access, recording disclosures, HIPAA de-identification, and consent management) which allowed OpenEMR to begin testing. [8]

Z&H Healthcare Solutions has contributed to the completion of the CCR and CCD modules and to the development of the NewCrop e-RX interface needed to meet the Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) requirements. They also developed a patient portal option that can be used as a drop-in replacement for the integrated patient portal. [9]

Key Volunteers:

Stephen Boyd-Smith is one of the four github integrators and was the one who suggested using github for the OpenEMR software repository. Mr. Boyd-Smith is a skillful and knowledgeable developer.

Michael Brody, DPM acted as the OpenEMR ONC Meaningful Use consultant and paid for the syndromic surveillance registry reporting. It would have been very difficult to understand the government requirements without Dr. Broady's help and direct advocacy with the ONC and the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) originally. His contributions allowed the OpenEMR project to begin even before the governing rules were finalized.

Tony McCormick is one of the four github integrators. He personally steered the ONC Meaningful Use Certification to fruition by organizing a Meaningful Use work group which met every Monday night for two years from 11-14-2009 through 08-08-2011. A skillful developer who has worked in medical software development field since 1988, Mr. McCormick has had a long professional experience in project management which he put to great use in the OpenEMR Project. His company Medical Information Integration (MI2) is highly qualified in custom development, support and training.

Rod Roark has been the longest, currently active, contributor to the project both personally and through his company Sunset Systems. His outstanding reputation as a developer and the work he donated to the OpenEMR software's terms of code review and integration of new software were instrumental in OpenEMR achieving the recent ONC Meaningful Use Certification. Mr. Roark serves as one of the administrators at the SourceForge/openemr web page and helps maintain the OpenEMR git repository.

Samuel T. Bowen, MD has been volunteering on the OpenEMR project since 2003. He organized the first not-for-profit Open Source Medical Software that has helped sponsor the OpenEMR project since 2005. Dr. Bowen and Tony McCormick organized the large Meaningful Use Project that resulted in the national certification of the OpenEMR software. Dr. Bowen, organized the OEMR non-profit with the assistance of MRSB, LLC, a healthcare consulting firm in Houston, Texas. Dr. Bowen was named the OEMR Executive Director in February 2011.

Sena Palanasami and his company ViCare+ performed a huge amount of work for the project. ViCare+ did the initial gap analysis of the OpenEMR Meaningful Use project that allowed the participants to organize the project's work into manageable pieces. ViCare+ also donated the entire Security and Privacy portion of the project and were in charge of quality assurance of the entire project.