Evaluating OpenEMR in Afghanistan

drbowen wrote on Tuesday, September 15, 2009:

Dear Dr. Bowen

I am the IT manager for an eye care program in Afghanistan. I’m evaluating OpenEMR for use at an eye hospital (University Eye Hospital) that we cooperatively run with Kabul Medical University. The hospital sees between 150 to 300 patients and does up to 25 eye surgeries each day, and trains residents in ophthalmology.
We have a database that we currently use only for patient registration that we acquired from Aravind (www.aravind.org) in India. Although this database is somewhat customized for our needs, I’m not completely happy with it as it’s very buggy, I don’t have access to the source code, and the systems it’s built on do not seem cost effective and are not very familiar to me. I’m interested to see how easy it would be to customize OpenEMR to meet our needs - specifically adjusting it to a socialized, cash-based medical system and to be specialized for eye care.

Best regards,

Matthew Brown

noor . it at iamafg . org

_________

Dear Matthew:

We have a vigorous and growing international user base. There are a number of small hospitals interested in using OpenEMR for similar purposes. We also have a growing number of opthalmology / optometry users who are interested in specialized eye exam forms.

If you would set up an account at SourceForge and post there. You will get a lot of enthusiastic help. I will start a thread for you on SourceForge:

Sincerely,

Sam Bowen, MD

http://oemr.org

sunsetsystems wrote on Tuesday, September 15, 2009:

OpenEMR might be a good fit.  It’s getting pretty good with cash-based  checkout.  On the clinical side, opthalmology will surely need some new forms.

But it’s all about the details.  I’d suggest jumping in with a recent CVS snapshot (for the user-creatable "layout based" encounter forms), and go from there.

Rod 
http://www.sunsetsystems.com/