Hello This is Harley Tuck, I have been doing Customer Service for MI-Squared and been involved in the OpenEMR project for over 15 years.Welcome to the OpenEMR community, I’m really sorry you’ve had that bad initial experience. From your descriptions I think what you need is a guided introduction to the project, and the OpenEMR documentation can provide that.
Here’s a page describing the different resources available for OpenEMR:
But first thing: here’s the page linking to the User Manuals:
Click on the ‘Current Stable Release’ or of the OpenEMR version you’re trying to use.
Let me run through some of your questions and either answer or give links to the docs that address your issues.
First, know that the videos are almost all out of date; do not spend time on them. Stick with the Wiki’s ‘Wiki Format’ and ‘Supplementary Topics’ pages.Second: in case your OpenEMR instance is not completely configured you can find a properly configured demo contain some sample data here:
1/ I cannot find patients easily. - the examples you gave sound like there may be a mis-match with the name data as it’s entered in the demographics. As long as you search for the text (including spaces) that is entered in the demographics you should be able to locate them.However, the Finder utility allows you to search by either first or surname. If you use both, the search term must be entered exactly with the comma in the right place. So the best search term would be what is in one name text area or the other.
This wiki page shows the steps carried out in a standard appointment/ encounter, including locating a patient record:
2/ I cannot find patient visit notes easily. - Visit notes are organized by the date of the visit. When you have the patient record showing, open the ‘Select Encounter’ dropdown and select the date of the encounter you wish to view.
3/ I cannot print patient notes easily - In the patient dashboard, select ‘Reports’
then in the Encounters and forms section, you can select the documents to print. Here, the pt only has one encounter, so just select those checkboxes and download the pdf,
4/ The Prescription module in OpenEMR is designed to be a standalone pharmacy and requires a fair amount of initial configuration. Its configuration is detailed in the wiki,here: Pharmacy Dispensary Module - OpenEMR Project Wiki
You have quite the list of issues and they would require a fair amount of time to answer them all. OpenEMR is not simply a Plug And Play application: it is very sophisticated and requires configurations, many of them requiring the expertise of IT professionals, to meet your specific needs. I suggest you look through the User Guides linked in this post to try to find the answers to the UI questions. The system behavior issues are doubtless a result of misconfigurations of the EMR server and if you search the forum for those specific topics, mentioned individually instead of all in one post, you will probably find your answers.
Best- Harley