I have tried OpenEMR for a total of about two weeks over the past months, including one week in a production environment, and it has been a painful experience for me. Could someone perhaps point me in the right direction? There must be something big that I’m missing.
I find that the user interface is so clumsy and inefficient that I figure I must be doing something wrong. Our setup is generally the default setup, and we have only made minimal changes (names of the “User Field 1” changed to “Insurance” etc.)
I have viewed YouTube videos for tutorials, but all videos I could find are either for an older version that looks different, or there are videos on “Complete Workflow For Clinics” that somehow skips over the part where a clinician has to use the EMR (it talks about entering info on a new patient, checking in the patient, etc and then what happens after the visit, but skips over the doctor portion itself).
Can other people tell me if the following experiences are what is supposed to happen? That is, is this the way OpenEMR is designed or have I failed to set it up correctly? I am only referring to the user interface and not about installation etc.
1/ I cannot find patients easily.
a) In the upper right corner of the main screen, it says “Search by any demographic”. When I type in, say, “Firstname Lastname”, it fails to find the patient. Same for when I type “Lastname, Firstname”. (When I type in only Lastname or Firstname, it finds all patients, but in our patient population many many patients share the same first/last names.)
b) Same thing when I try to search for patient by name when making an appointment (I click on an appointment slot and search for patient). I type in (fictitious name) “Lee Siu Ming” or “Lee, Siu Ming” or “Siu Ming Lee” and it doesn’t find the name. When I type in just “Lee” it finds the entire list of Lee’s, and when I scroll through, I see that “Lee, Siu Ming” is one of the choices.
- is this because OpenEMR cannot handle names with spaces in them? Almost our entire population has two-word first names. (E.g. if we treat “Siu Ming” as first and middle name and just search for Lee, Siu then too many names pop up.)
2/ I cannot find patient visit notes easily.
- once I have the patient name on OpenEMR, I cannot get a list of patient visit notes from any of the menu items across the top main menu ( which are: Calendar | Finder | Flow | Recalls | Messages | Patient | Fees | Modules | Procedures | Admin | Reports | Miscellaneous | Popups ) nor the items under “Medical Record Dashboard - ” ( which are: Dashboard | History | Assessments | Report | Documents | Transactions | Issues | Ledger | External Data ).
- it turns out that I need to click on the Select Encounter dropdown, but this doesn’t give basic information such as which doctor was seen by the patient, only the date and whether the encounter was for “Established Patient” or other type of encounter.
3/ I cannot print patient notes easily
- once I find the encounter, it shows notes for “Dispensed Medications” and “SOAP” notes. “SOAP” is what I need; suppose I want to print this out to give to the patient, or to the specialist as part of a referral. Nowhere am I able to print this out.
- in turns out that, when I see the SOAP note I want to print out, I need to go back to the patient Dashboard (but there is no word “Dashboard” to click on; I have to remember to click on the patient name) and then click on Report, then select the encounter. Then I have to unselect the “Billing” checkbox because I don’t want to print billing information in medical notes I give to the specialist.
Please. I just want to print the note that I see on the screen when I look at patient notes. (I cannot do screenshot because that includes other irrelevant items, and the SOAP note might not fit into one screen entirely.)
4/ I cannot prescribe. At all.
- I am not sure why there is a prominent field for “Dispensed Medications” as I don’t dispense any medication; I just give patients a prescription to take to the pharmacy to get the medicine.
- However, nowhere is there a place to type in a prescription so I can print it out on paper and sign it
- Even if I use some other way to give a prescription to a patient, I don’t even see a place just to record which prescriptions I gave to the patient.
5/ it crashes when I try to enter insurance info
- as soon as I enter some patient insurance info, OpenEMR freezes
- I think OpenEMR is trying to look up the insurance info and display some information … but surely when the search is unsuccessful (perhaps we have no internet connection at the moment), it should not freeze?
- we ended up having to rename the “User Field 1” into “Insurance” so we could use it to enter insurance info without crashing.
6/ it is slow, even when I’m only using a locally installed setup
- I am testing this on my own laptop (it’s a new expensive gaming laptop with 32GB memory and a huge SSD drive) and it doesn’t even need to access the Internet. Nevertheless, the response to clicking can take long enough (3-5 seconds) that sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s frozen and I should click again.
All this is enough to keep me from actually using it in a production environment. I could go on, about the appointment calendar and lab results and all, but … is there something I’m doing wrong? For example, am I blind in not finding anywhere to enter a prescription? I’ve installed XAMPP and MySQL and it seems to allow OpenEMR to work, but it seems like I couldn’t possibly be doing this right, because how could people use this?
Could you folks share what it’s like to use OpenEMR, in terms of ease of use, responsiveness, user-friendliness, etc.?Is this what it’s really like, or what am I doing wrong? Do people really use it for billing insurance, or just for appointments? Storing notes? Looking at labs?
OpenEMR v8.0.0 on Windows 11 + XAMPP.
