Job Description
IT specialist to install and configure OpenEMR for Eagle Eyecare. May require answering lots of silly questions about the system and workflow from our Optometrist
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.
I can support what @adunsulag is saying being a vendor that provides support. I have come across installs that have been so far removed from the codebase it was impossible to upgrade from version they were on to the latest codebase.
What Stefan mentioned are very good practices and I wholeheartedly support. This is why we support customers by providing them with keys to the AWS instance that they need to store in a safe place that will give them access to another provider if they need to switch from our service.
That is why we stress to clients that we are working for them. The client owns the software and we are just support and development. If a provider will not give access to the code and provide the ability to move the installation if you want. Find another provider.