I apologize if posted in the wrong category. I just wanted to share some light regarding an upcoming funding opportunity from the US Department of Health Services to fund Health Center Programs to move into UDS+. Currently, all Health Centers that are receiving funding from HRSA are reporting to HRSA using the EHB system in which data is manually entered into the EHB system by Health Centers. Now they are looking into electronic integration between EMRs and the UDS reporting system using FHIR. I don’t know the details yet but they say it is about 55 million US Dollars. I think there might be a possibility for OEMR to take this opportunity to create a UDS+ reporting module to do just that.
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Are you talking about the FQHC program? Are you connected with a health center program wanting to leverage OpenEMR? If so please let us know as we have a number of things we’d like to do to support FQHC and if there are funding opportunities that’s something the OpenEMR project is interested in doing. The challenge we’ve had in the past is not having a FQHC interested in using OpenEMR.
Thanks,
Stephen Nielson
OpenEMR Project Administrator
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Hi Stephen,
Yes, I work for Pohnpei Community Health Center which is a FQHC. We are not as big the the other CHCs in the United States but we are one of them. Actually, we are one of the poorest CHCs serving over 20,000 patients with incomes below poverty line. I implemented OpenEMR at our facility in 2015 and started using it in 2016 until now. We were fortunate to have chosen OpenEMR. It has served our purpose to deliver quality health services to many people who cannot afford quality health care. I watched the video on OpenEMR FHIR - Lecture 1. It would be nice if OpenEMR could preconfigure its FHIR feature or maybe call it UDS+ feature for which users would just click on it at the end of each year and be done with UDS reports. Sorry, didn’t mean to get carried away.
Regards,
Kanoberson Asher
IT- Pohnpei Community Health Center
Stephen, Keep in mind that in addition to FQHCs you have the sister program
which is the entire RHC (rural health clinic) community (5500 clinics in US) that would benefit from openEMR specific initiatives. Multiple grant and funding opportunities available there as well. Shameless plug, we are a small multi-center RHC operation just getting done with our transition away from a standard vendor type EHR to OEMR.
And I helped! 
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Has there been any progress in developing more functionality for FQHC’s and RHC’s? I would think OpenEMR would be a great platform for these and other similar Community Health Organizations. Operating Expenses are going up and reimbursements aren’t keeping up.