While updating the OpenEMR demo farm, the old demo farm went down a couple times. And during this time I received several emails from students/instructors whom were obviously using the online demos for their course work (which is really cool btw). I just assumed that classes would install their own local versions, but it appears there is a group of folks that simply direct to the demos. It seems to be specifically version 4.1.2 since there is demo data for it, even though it is 4 years old! http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/OpenEMR_Version_4.1.2_Demo
There are 2 things that seem to make sense.
The first is we need a 5.0.0 demo that contains some demo data, which I am working on.
The second is does it make sense to support a batch of demos for education/instructional use. The new demo farm used by OpenEMR can support about 10-12 demos(note I have not yet found the upper limit, but memory is getting pretty limited with 10 demos) for about $25 per month on a t2.medium aws instance(EDIT 9/26/17: see post below where we can actually likely provide up to 50 demos per t2.medium aws instance). Does it make sense to work with education folks to produce educational focused material/demos?
Hi Brady,
My opinion is to not do separate demo’s. First, Matt put all the work into a cloud solution with this being a perfect use case. Second, I think you will find a continuous stream of requests to add one thing or another to meet their curriculum. Third, bandwidth will become a never caught tail to chase. Fourth, you have to sleep sometime and lastly,you need the time to keep me straight on translations.
Yes, I think that’s a great idea. But fund out who is using it and how they want to use to direct your data. If you have an instructional demo, you may ask how long they need the data or encourage them to use the cloud version.
I think there is value to this idea. Educational institutions could apply for a grant through OEMR and that could help support the installs. We could develop some type of agreement where the university would be responsible for specific elements (I.e. we won’t be creating custom forms for them)
I think this has the benefit of opening the educational space to a more concrete OpenEMR implementation and it also would help OEMR fulfill the educational goals of its mission.
We could easily develop an internal dashboard to help manage the installs
My 2 cents (literally have “2” items for consideration):
Direct them to the OpenEMR Cloud solution. They may come back saying it’s not in their budget or they don’t have anyone tech savy to run through it. This is okay, we should at least send them a link just in case they are interested (will save us work).
I’m super happy to hear that unis are jumping on our platform. It makes so much sense to me to use OpenEMR as a teaching tool because of the featureset and cost! I agree with Joyce that we should identify the folks that are using the system. Maybe we can set up a web conference with them to understand their exact use case and data needs. Regardless, we need NAMCS in OpenEMR, but this will take a LOT of effort. John and I have started on it, but it’s still a pretty involved effort.
working on announcement of OpenEMR-Analytics platform, which together with demo data, expected to be of interest to the biostats and health analytics educational communities
demo data update: #1 source is Synthea records but dependent OpenEMR FHIR server capability. NAMCS preprocessed (2012) data has lot of missing data, e.g., 50% of med have no match in code set. Latest NAMCS raw data (2015) is our #2 source of of demo data. Could use community input on which source # to prioritize resources …
As a first step to bring the education folks into modern OpenEMR use, I created a 5.0.0 demo with the same data as was used in the prior 4.1.2 demo (also proving that an upgrade from 4.1.2 to 5.0.0 worked without a hitch ). This should hopefully make it easy for them to migrate from using the 4.1.2 demo to this 5.0.0 demo, which is now the main OpenEMR demo here: http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/OpenEMR_Demo
Also something to note is that with recent improvement with the OpenEMR Demo Farm (Demo farm and up for grabs demos are back!) we can literally offer up to 50 demos or more on the aws instance we are using ($25 a month and probably a couple bucks of data; luckily aws only charges for outgoing data and would be more expensive if charged for incoming data which is relatively huge since each day we already have 20 demos collecting openemr from github to build the demos).
There’s also huge flexibility in support for demo data (ie. each demo can grab whatever it is assigned). @JBW , regarding demo data, whatever we can get going the quickest would be my vote.
