I hope this email finds you well.
My name is YIOHAR, a 32-year-old frontline medical ultrasound professional (sonologist) from China. I am writing to you today as an independent open-source enthusiast who is currently working on a deep localization and Chinese translation project for OpenEMR.
Currently, I am running a Docker-based instance of OpenEMR on my personal home server (Unraid/ZimaOS). I am actively using this system to systematically manage and audit the clinical medical records, health history, and diagnostic files for my entire family. Driven by this practical family healthcare scenario, I am individually going through the system’s language database, sorting out and refining the Chinese translation line by line in my limited spare time.
It is worth noting that my translation is NOT a simple, word-for-word literal translation of the English strings. Literal translation often sounds robotic and unusable in a real clinical setting. Instead, I am translating based on my deep understanding of hospital workflows, strictly standing in the shoes of frontline clinicians, patients, and hospital IT/Information Departments. My goal is to make every label, workflow indicator, and error message punchy, professional, and compliant with actual clinical habits.
During this deep localization process, I have come up with two major structural feature requests and one translation bug that I believe would greatly benefit OpenEMR’s global adoption:
1. Feature Request: Toggle for “Single Full-Name Field” Mode
In many Asian countries, names are treated as a unified whole and are never split into “First Name” and “Last Name” in any official medical or HIS environment. Forcing split fields and rendering western commas creates massive visual clutter for local medical staff.
My Suggestion: Could OpenEMR introduce a global toggle in the System Settings (Globals) to allow users to switch between the traditional split-name fields and a single, unified “Full Name” input box? This would achieve true internationalization for Asian naming conventions.
2. Feature Request: A Master Switch to Hide All Billing/Fees Components
In Asian public medical systems, clinicians do not handle pricing or input fees manually during consultations; billing is fully automated or managed by separate centralized billing departments. Furthermore, for users running OpenEMR as a personal or family health station to manage home health records, the massive billing, insurance, and tax modules are entirely redundant.
My Suggestion: Could the team implement a master switch/toggle in the system config to completely hide or reveal all billing, payment, and fees-related modules? When turned off, the interface would become a pure, clean clinical workstation. This would be a game-changer for family health auditing, where tracking complex commercial insurance is unnecessary.
3. Localization Bug: Hardcoded “Finder” String
While translating the Language Admin tables, I noticed that the string “Finder” (and its relevant components) cannot be localized. Even when I manually update its translation in the language tables, the frontend text remains stubbornly in English. It appears this specific string is hardcoded directly into the frontend templates rather than routing through the language engine. Could the team please parameterize this in future updates?
I am fully aware that OpenEMR is an open-source project and translating it does not bring the financial rewards that commercial software might offer. However, when I think of this work as a safety net for my own family’s health and a core support system for my home, and when I imagine future users navigating this software easily without feeling the same sense of helplessness that I once felt—seeing instead a language that carries the genuine warmth of our culture—that is where my true motivation comes from.
Since I am working on this immense localization project entirely on my own, it might take a long, long time before the translation is fully completed. However, my ultimate goal is to share my work back with you and officially contribute it to the OpenEMR community, so that Simplified Chinese users worldwide can feel the support and human warmth that open-source technology can bring.
I would love to hear your thoughts on these workflow suggestions. Thank you so much for your time and dedication to global healthcare IT!
Best regards,
YIOHAR
Frontline Sonologist & OpenEMR Localization Contributor
Location: Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China