Hello OpenEmr community,
My partner and I are trying to expand our computer consulting business and help bring our local medical community into the 21st century. We have reviewed several pieces of software and think OpenEmr is a great choice to bring to the doctors in our city.
In the interest of learning the software before we can train others on it, I had a couple questions:
1) I read in another post in the forums that it is possible to attach scanned documents to a patients record in the database. I clicked the link in the post but it was dead. Can anyone give me details on how to do this? We are hoping to be able to scan the patients previous records into their new electronic one.
2) I installed a test version of OpenEmr on my home machine and have been working with it using advice found in numerous other posts. but I am getting an error that I have not seen posted anywhere yet. When I try to install some of the forms. I have enabled a few with no problem. Two of them, however, will register, but when I click "install DB" I get "ERR: could not open table.sql, broken form?"
System details are:
OpenEmr 2.6.0
Windows XP Pro
xampp with Apache 2.0.53/PHP 4.3.11/MySQL 4.1.11
Thanks to everyone who helped develop this great software. And TIA to all those who can help me out with these dilemmas!
Chris @ SANS of Yuma
OpenEMR 2.6.0 is quite old. The current release is 2.7.2.
Also it’s mostly used with Linux. I think there are a couple of brave Windows users out there, but I’m not sure how well they are faring.
But to answer your questions: (1) There’s a Documents link available after you look up a patient, though I don’t recall what the state of that was with 2.6.0. (2) Some forms are experimental and may not work.
I am currently using 2.6.0 EA. The ability to scan documents was not introduced till about 2.7.0.
You would be much better off with the current 2.7.2.
There was a lively discussion about the pros and cons of loading images into the database versus storing them on the local hard drive with a pointer in the EMR to the correct file. This thread starts with this message:
The current method supported in OpenEMR is local hard drive storage with a pointer in the database.
Tekkno Genius and I, both have working software that loads the images into the database. This is the method I use on my production server. If you are interested in this solution I will be glad to forward the necessary files to you.
Caveats:
In WIndows there are couple of gotchas:
OpenEMR is not yet patched for PHP5 which is what is currently being shipped with XAMPP. To save a lot of headaches you should revert to PHP4.
XAMPP ships with Magic_Quotes = On . For OpenEMR to work correctly you will need to turn Magic_Quotes = Off . The modern PHP ships with Magic Quotes off. This will cause excessive stipping of the slashes in your path. Instead of
C:\public\XAMPP\something\openemr\
you will get:
C:publicXAMPPsomethingopenemr\
This actually affects the uploading of documents the most.
Thanks to both of you. I will try the upgrade to 2.7.2. I would appreciate those files to be able to attach documents. You can reach me at luke731@users.sourceforge.net
I actually became a "brave windows user" by default. I had originally tried to install the 2.7.1 rpm file in Mandrake 10.1, but I keep getting an error and the install would proceed no further. I get:
"Some package requested cannot be installed:
openemr-2.7.0-1mdk.i586 (due to unsatisfied php-xmlrpc)"
I have minimal experience with Linux and did not really know what that meant. So after I found the tutorial posted by Arctic Inferno on installing in windows, I gave that a shot. I would prefer to be able to run openemr in Linux since that is what it was designed for. I realize this is a bit off the topic, but any advice in this area would be appreciated also.
Generally most of the development is happening in linux and the greatest number of deveopers - users are working in linux. Linux related quetions will tend to happen quicker and at a higher level.
There are users working with Windows but the Windows-OpenEMR community is very small.
So your personal choice of which way to go will depend on your skill level and your personal desires. Windows will likely require a much skill level on your part than linux because of the help related factors listed above.
Pretty much all of my experience is in Windows. I have only recently ventured into the world of Linux, but I see that it is becoming more popular and flexible, and the community as a whole seems to be very supportive of one another. I would like to start using Linux more and gain more experience it it. I don’t like being forced to constantly patch and secure the current Windows environments.
I will see if I can get OpenEmr working on my Linux machine. I’m not entirely sure if I set up Mandrake correctly during the install, since it was my first attempt at Linux, but hopefully it is correct enough for this to work. If not, I’m sure you will be hearing from me again.