pninan wrote on Wednesday, December 03, 2014:
Hello All!
Who am I?
My name is Phillip Ninan. I’m a recent grad from Stony Brook University and currently starting my career as a software engineer. I have 5+ years experience in Java, JavaEE (Spring, Tomcat, Struts), C, Objective-C, SQL, HTML, PHP. I have done a lot of research and am very interested in Health Care Technology
Why am I here?
Im very excited to start contributing to an open source project! A family member has a small private practice and decided that he is interested in converting his current records system to an EMR system. I’m looking at this as an opportunity to build something that im really interested in as well as something that will help my family.
What do I want to bring to the table?
After some research and input from several physicians, the general requirements of an EMR system for counseling / physiatry vs family practice have significant differences. In a family practice doctors may input weight, height, allergies, prescriptions, etc. All these items are very simple or can be a look up value. But in counseling, providers have to input much more detailed notes about their patients. These notes provide meaningful use. Most of the time this involves typing up notes after a session or transcribing notes. I would like to engineer a simple convenient solution. OpenEMR seems like a great place to start!
Where to begin?
To begin im going follow the instructions on how to setup the project. Once I can get the project running on a MAMP or WAMP server I can start to play around with it and get a feel for the architecture. I also plan on reading through as much documentation as I can.
Questions:
1.Any advice on setting this project up on a virtual server?
2.Any recommendations or must reads on the wiki? (although i plan on going through it this week)
3.After only an initial look through the code base it doesn’t SEEM as dense as some other software I have worked on. Any advice on a good place to start debugging / understanding a high level dev view of openEMR?
4.This project has been around for a long time. I see its written in PHP, any in-site on why that technology was chosen? (I’m not down playing PHP, just curious why it was / is the best tool for this project)
5.Have their been efforts to convert this to a Java project? Any opposition? Architecture constraints that aren’t obvious?
6.Where does this project need help? High / low priority items? Short / Long term goals?
7.My family member would like to have his EMR system up and running by March 2015. He has < 100 active patients and they’re are all in an electronic billing system. Is having an openEMR system up and running by this deadline a realistic goal? I would be completing this project by myself and hopefully the help of this community!