History of OEMR
The history of Open Source Medical Software (OSMS) and its relationship with the OpenEMR project can be reviewed by looking over the minutes of the Board of Director meetings. This have been available for public review on-line since about October of 2005. The current web location is here:
http://www.openmedsoftware.org/wiki/Board_Meeting_Agendas_and_Minutes
I have personally been using OpenEMR is live production since November 2004 beginning with version 2.0 from Synitech. (My first installed test version was 1.7 from Synitech). Very early on I was told “no” repeatedly by the owners of Synitech and later PennFirm when I tried to have an input on the software development process. I felt that it was critical to have physician input into the function and design of OpenEMR for it to be an effective clinical tool. I also realized that I would have to control the purse strings to have an effective input into the project.
I began organizing OSMS in the fall of 2004 when I hired Emily Killian to create the frame work of a not-for-profit company that would provide direction and financial support to the OpenEMR project. Emily Killian is a professional news paper journalist and graphic artist. Ms. Killian wrote the current OSMS by-laws, conflict of interest policy, and other required not-for-profit policies. She served on the first Board of Directors and designed the blue logo with the white star burst that we now use for the project. She used all open source tools to do this and used the Gimp to design the logo. The OSMS not-for-profit officially came into existence March 15, 2005. The first meetings were held with employees of my office as the Board-of-Directors. This was useful only because it helped us get the nonproft actually created but they were otherwise not very interested.
At almost the same time that OSMS came into existence on March 15th, PennFirm lost their main developers and got tired of losing money on OpenEMR. PennFirm transferred control of the project from their private servers to SourceForge on March 8th and 9th of 2005. If anyone cares to look I made the first post on 2 out of three forums here on SourceForge to try to get some forum conversations going on the brand new forums. At that time I engaged in a series of on-line email conversations with Andres Paglayan, Rod Roard, and James Perry, Jr. They seemed to be very interested in giving the OpenEMR project leadership and direction. I invited them to join the OSMS board which in my personal opinion, they seemed to happy to get involved with this organization.
In the Open Source Medical Software Board of Directors meeting of September 21, 2005 I nominated Rod Roark, Andres Paglayan, and James Perry. Jr. to be on the Board of Directors and the resignations of my office staff were accepted. The OpenEMR public web page was discussed at that meeting. Neither Rod Roark, Andres Paglayan or Janes Perry, Jr. would accept the responsibility of becoming the web-master of the public web page. The names openemr.net, openemr.org and openemr.com were owned by others who were unwilling to sell or give up control of the web pages. We settled officially on oemr.org as the official web page. Rod Roark found the oemr.org domain name and this name was accepted as the official pubic web page. I am not sure, but I think Brady Miller actually changed the link on the SourceForge summary page to point at oemr.org.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/openemr/
Since the adoption of oemr.org as the official public web page, I have been the web-master. I have been assisted mightily by Brady Miller for several years. More recently the web pages have been managed by Brady Miller, Julia Longtin, Jason Brooks, and Jeremy Wallace. I wrote a successful grant and was awarded $2,500 by the Hickory Springs Corporation which was used to purchase a server that was built and delivered by Rod Roark and is currently still serving oemr.org and openmedsoftware.org. At the FOSS Healthcare meeting in July30-Aug1 2009 meeting hosted in Houston we had 12 OpenEMR project members in attendance and used this as a mini-summit. Julia Longtin and Tony McCormick and others were uuhhh.... “complaining” about the use of Xoops on the public web page oemr.org and requested that the wiki at least be converted to “MediaWiki.” MediaWiki is the same software that is used by Wikipedia and is much more common and the syntax is more widely used by web-designers and web-masters. The conversion of the Xoops run web site to MediaWiki was accomplished primarily by Brady Miler and Julia Lontin with input from Jeremy Wallace and Tony McCormick. The intent of course is to convert all of the back to oemr.org which has been hung because every one has been so busy with their private businesses. I have already requested that we start making this conversion back to oemr.org.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/openemr/forums/forum/202506/topic/4011231
Over the years I have been stuck with the “professional” opinions of different board members with what we should do with the public web page. This is how I got stuck with using Xoops in the first place. The “expert” who was supposed to help me never did anything and I got left holding the bag. Of all the people in the project only, Brady Miller has stepped up to with professional competence to help repeatedly with the oemr.org web page over a sustained period of time. Brady is pretty busy reviewing all the software of the Meaningful Use Project and has asked that this be delayed until things aren't quite so frenzied.
I have also been the Search Engine Optimizer for the project for the last five years. I have many hours over the last five years adding links to oemr.org from lots of different sites including Linuxmednews.org, the official Debian site, Freshmeat, Wikipedia, Linkedin, and Digg among others. This activity has been assisted by Brady Miller and Dr. Mark Leeds. The result of this is oemr.org has developed very high rankings and oemr.org is frequently on the first page if not the #1 spot of all 7 of the major search engines. These type of web rankings were achieved through the hard work of Brady Miller, Mark Leeds, DO and myself.
As to my original goal to have physician input into the project, Of the original 4 Board Members one has a sister who is a physician, two were married to physicians and the fourth is a physician (yours truly). We have also had some physicians who are also software developers. The most prominent of these are Brady Miller, MD and Mark Leeds, DO. There may be others that are escaping me but I am not leaving you out intentionally. This strong physician input has been the main driving force behind why OpenEMR is so functional and easy to use for physicians.
There are already 5 webmasters: Brady Miller, Julia Longtin, Jason Brooks, Jeremy Wallace, and myself. Recently I have tried to stay out tinkering with the web page as webmaster other than to help fix new project members with their privileges. I did discover one successful hack of the oemr.org webpage. This was a cross-scripting attack that was closed by Rod Roark. I rank my web-master skills somewhat higher than my developer skills but I recognize that Brady Miller, Julia Longtin, Jason Brooks, and Jeremy Wallace are much more skilled than I and I for one prefer to let them do the heavy lifting. I continue to function more as an assistant web master to help users with their memberships.
Because of the central nature of oemr.org web page to the current success of the OpenEMR project I recommended that a new not-for-profit called OEMR be created. This organization was recently created by Greg Neuman, the attorney for the not-for-profits TBT.org ( http://www.tbt.org/ ) and Patient Physician Cooperatives ( http://www.patientphysiciancoop.com/ ) based in Houston, Texas. Greg Neuman and founder Don McCormick have substantial experience in organizing and running non-profits. TBT.org is a humanitarian project providing clothes, food, and help assist with power bills, water bills and so forth for needy individuals in the Houston, Galveston, Freeport Texas area. Patient Physician Cooperatives helps provide health care for its membership. The pimary qualification is that the membership is for individuals that do not have health care. Greg Neuman has also been successful recently in the application for the tax-exempt status 501(c)(3) for the OEMR organization. We think this is critical in terms of resource development, fund raising and grant writing.
Open Source Medical Software will continue with its mission of trying to assistant open source medical software projects in general whereas OEMR will concentrate solely on the OpenEMR Project. Because OEMR now has its own separate organization I have been urging the project developers to make more active use of the already very successful oemr.org web page. The oemr.org DNS ownership was recently very generously donated by Mr. Rod Roark to the OEMR organization.
Sam Bowen, MD