We are evaluating OpenEMR for possible use in a Nursing college to give nursing students practice working with electronic medical records. I’ve installed and configured the software and have everything working as it should; however, it seems there is no built-in way to bulk create users-seems I must do it one at a time. That has me wondering if this would be suitable for use in this type setting where we would have 3,000+ users (nursing students) with accounts creating and working with records? I’m sure I could figure out how to create the users directly in the db, but I’m wondering if this is more intended for a few people to use and manage vs what we’re looking to use it for?? Any advice/thoughts would be appreciated.
Hi Steve
You can create and upload the user details directly into the DB using phpmyadmin. I believe your effort will go a long way in making OpenEMR popular. Any reasonable help or support that you may need will be given to you pro bono by my company to make this happen.
Don’t overlook this slick data generator for random patients, demographics, insurance companies, and assigning ins co.s to patients created by Art Eaton to run on Windows.
Hi
We break it down by class and assign a site per class. We start off with a base install with patients, encounters and other data. We then use the admin.php tool to create additional sites per class and then just add the users from that group.
This way groups have the same starting database. This is also cool because we keep the same codebase across all classes.
Thanks to everyone for the quick replies and the tips. I’ll be demonstrating this to some key people in the organization next week so your input is much appreciated-thanks Jack for the data generator zip…this should help a great deal. I’m still trying to better develop my understanding of the basic work-flow and where the nurse would typically fit into that flow…what should already be created for them when they login…I’m sure I’ll be back with more questions as I delve more into this…
Steve,
Tasks which nurses would need to document in OpenEMR would include, but not be limited to:
1. Taking and Recording Vital Signs
2. Administration of Medications/Vaccinations
3. Reviewing current medications with patients and documenting meds.
4. Helping provide patient education materials
Also, I suspect that the workflow in OpenEMR for this would depend highly across offices, but a Physician might indicate that he needs a nurse to perform a blood draw by posting a message/note in OpenEMR.
I Am also told that the following are basically a nurses jurisdiction apart from what is mentioned by Yehster :
1.Recording medical history including medication reconciliation
2.Documenting Physical Assessment
3.Nursing care plan and outcomes (very important for nursing)
4.Nurses notes
These are some of the stuff that was thrown at me by an accomplished nurse manager of INOVA.
Regards
Shameem
It is really nice to know that you are planning to use OpenEMR on a bigger scale. Since this will immensely add to the popularity of OpenEMR, we offer to host this at no charge to you (as part of our effort to give back to the community). You can reach me at srikant@emrtsolutions.com
Thanks for the offer Srikant…I’ll keep you in mind, but I believe we’ll be able to handle the hosting part…we’re hosting several other php/mysql applications and one we really do like having out hands on the code so we can tweak to our needs.
Thanks Yehster and Shameem…yes, nursing care plans is a big part of our curriculum…I’m still pondering how to implement this, but assume custom forms may be the way to do??
I created 5000 patients with the script Jack pointed me to (thanks for that) and this will certainly help populating the db. I’m now looking to see if there is a build-in way to assign patients to our nursing students so that each student doesn’t have access to all 5,000 patients?? I’m sure we could code this in, but if it’s already there and someone could point me to it, that would be great.
Once we get this close to working the way we want, then I’ll make a screencast to demo what we have and invite additional feedback and suggestions-and of course, if we have anything others could use we will share.
Steve
You see how passionate and welcoming the community is to new opportunity!! Should leave no doubt in your mind about the wisdom of choosing OpenEMR.
The restriction of patients to providers, at least as far as I know, has not been implemented. We also wanted user restriction to facilities as well. These are important enhancements that we are looking forward to.
I am creating an online course for learning OpenEMR using Moodle course development software. Altho it is still being tuned, in beta test stage, it is far enough along for students to learn OpenEMR capabilities. If you would like to review this online course, please advise at harrisonrjr@gmail.com . It would be to our mutual benefit since we could improve the course based on your comments, while your students receive free OpenEMR training.
I think that you should consider that quanity != quality. It seems more useful to develop a smaller set of “test cases.” with some for thought into their clinical situations rather than trying to just throw data into the system.
For example, create 10 or so patients each with a unique condition. Then put each of those patients into the daily calendar. If this were my task, I would come up with a mechanism to repopulate and reset the data set daily. Also consider creating a smaller set of test users rather than one for every student.
If you try to run all 3000 users managing 5000 patients, I think you are going to run into some serious performance issues. Tony has been having problems with ~4000 patients and far fewer concurrent users. I don’t mean to discourage you, but OpenEMR has never been deployed in such a large environment.
The new indexing fixed a lot of the issues, and Dr Bowen has some 15,000 patient records. But 3000 users is likely to be a problem. I would suggest creating an environment that lets students spinup a new virtual machine pre-loaded with test data for course work for their own use. Julia Longtin created a system like that, took about 10 min to spin up a new instance of OpenEMR.
Rather than creating 3000+ users that will change every few months, it will be easier to activate PHP’s LDAP support and add few lines of code to authenticate user login against the college’s systems.
You can then set up ‘facilities’ as classes. As suggested earlier, if patients need to be restricted to classes, that will need some refinement.
Finally, don’t forget to check the language feature to really customize what students see on their screen.
@mdsupport: Thanks for the suggestions…yes, I’m sure we will go with authenticating against an external db when we put this into production. We’ll be piloting it with just a couple classes first and will just create accounts directly in emr for that. I’ve been looking at the facilities set-up…we have campuses in 4 states and was thinking of setting up each campus as a facility, but am unsure of the benefit if we can’t restrict patients and/or users (nursing students) to those facilities. I’m not sure how setting up classes as separate facilities would be of benefit at this point??…but I may be overlooking something.
@Tony….yes, I’ve experimented with other php applications running on a usb using XAMPP….we’ll need instructors to be able to easily see, assess, and provide feedback on what students are doing, so that would be a bit tough logistically…still, local copies on usb for the students own use/practice is an interesting idea…
Thanks again to everyone for your input/suggestions