ideaman911 wrote on Thursday, October 08, 2009:
You might all be interested in my response to the request by Jonena Reith, President of TBD Consulting, for EMR / EHR Success Stories in the EMR / EHR / PHR Clinical Transformation group in which we are both members:
Jonena;
I myself am a success story - I have implemented OpenEMR in a number of sites, and I advise on its use in their forums at Sourceforge.net. My wife Lynne was my first "client", and her use of FREE OpenEMR allowed her to eliminate all need for my services as her business office manager, as well as all clearinghouse costs, as it prepares both X12 and CMS 1500 directly.
Because she has a house call practice, and G3 dependability is a joke, I converted the Linux web-based OpenEMR to stand-alone on her windows tablet notebook. That works especially well with the VPN I used, since her biller is at another location entirely, but can do the billing whenever Lynne is at a hotspot without Lynne even having to be aware of it. And every night it backs itself up to our server, which is always accessible by the biller for looking at information which is no more than 24 hours old.
What Lynne gets in her practice is first and foremost the ability to eliminate all the lugging of paper records and the risk of their damage by the elements, etc., to say nothing of the nightly HIPAA backup security which paper could never afford. She uses the hotspots to connect to Allscripts for her FREE e-Rx so she can get the Medicare 2% incentive for 2009, which was simple to setup in OpenEMR both because it is open source, so can be made to do whatever the user wants for greatest efficiency and effectivity for their individual practice, and because it is designed for flexibility in configuration. In fact, the latest version, 3.1.0 just released, is the ONLY EMR system I am aware of which is operable in the native language of the user on a shared system with multiple users. So an inner-city clinic with primarily latino population, but also english speakers, need not have ALL its staff be bi-lingual. And yet it is STILL FREE.
You can see some of the support I have provided others as a volunteer at the OpenEMR forums at Sourceforge.net as ideaman911.
That ANY intelligent user would pay for a proprietary system merely makes me question their grades in economics. Checkout oemr,org for details. Then give me a call if you want somebody else to setup, maintain and modify so you need not have ANY IT skills whatsoever. I will be happy to help you as I have helped others, at very reasonable costs for those services alone.
Joe Holzer Idea Man 315-622-9241 im@holzerent.com
http://www.holzerent.com