So glad that people in the community reached out to you to help with your needs! Its a great community. I do want to mention that you make sure in talking with whoever is doing the work to talk with them about upgrades and how they handle migrations / transitions to different vendors. I don’t provide installation support myself (I just do development, not support) but I do see a lot of people getting stuck when whoever set things up for them doesn’t talk with their customer about these issues.
OpenEMR releases a major version about every 1-2 years and patches between 2-4 times a year. Many of those patches contain security updates and are pretty critical to apply between major release versions. These should be done on a copy of the system you are using before they get applied to your main production environment to make sure nothing breaks during the updates. The next major release of OpenEMR is a big one and changes a number of things in order for us to obtain 2015 CEHRT certification in the USA. That will be something you’ll want to plan for and discuss with your vendor. That major release will come out in the next 2-3 months.
Vendors come and go (or change prices or personnel) and sometimes you need to change vendors. Having a plan in place of passwords, infrastructure, custom changes, and anything else needed to switch to a different provider is critical for your business. Many users of OpenEMR end up stuck on old release versions because their developer/vendor made custom code and didn’t track what files / changes they made and the cost to upgrade gets really expensive, really fast w/o that change in place. So you should have something in place where the vendor gives you access to all the list of files / custom settings they may have made for your installation.
I hope things go fabulously well, just wanted to give you some heads up things to consider as you move forward. Good luck.
