Hi Robert-
I’m fairly old school as far as notions of pedagogy are concerned, but in my opinion school is a great place to teach people how to manage the compromises required in holding down a real- life job. The healthcare world is full of examples, such as at my work our lead dev who runs Mac has chosen platform agnostic dev applications so he and our other devs who use MSWindows and Linux can work together. But I’m curious what your observations are of the medical IT world, and also what are the requirements of your teaching position?
I.e., are you mandated to teach on Windows? If that’s the case, one would hope you would be financed for the bare minimum of the costs of the suftware? But if you’re not, even the Windows version of OpenEMR can be set up with its own free/ no-cost web server to deliver the OpenEMR on the sub-net it’s on behind the school router’s firewall.
But a large portion the medical IT scene is installed on Linux web servers, the OS for which (and OpenEMR itself of course) is available free of charge. The EMR is delivered as a web site, into which the users log with a browser running on a PC running any OS you want. And for a user load of a couple dozen at a time, you wouldn’t need more than a 10 year old reasonably beefy desktop computer-- there’s no need for a purpose built ‘server’ per se, unless you want to run the OpenEMR 24/7 for the whole IT Department.
Here are some forum posts that may be old but they will give some idea of the hardware requirements. Note, they talk about RAM on the order of 8 gigs…
and just as a random aside this might be interesting:
OpenEMR with aaPanel and LAMP stack on Linux Virtual Machine - OpenEMR Project Wiki )
You might consider giving them the opportunity to work together, say, on a term project to come up with the ‘best’ (define the specification to suit) procedure to install OpenEMR on a Mac. And I’m not completely clear on the scope of your class. If it’s strictly ‘how to use an EMR’ you would get into such user or admin tasks as discussed in the OpenEMR wiki,
Ok, but I ramble.
Once we have an idea of your actual needs I could get specific about the training I am able to offer. No matter what, I would be happy to answer emailed questions, so let’s start with that.
More later- Harley