This is the forum thread for the next OEMR Board meeting, which will be on Wednesday, August 10, 2016, at 6:00 PM Pacific time. Call in details can be found here: How to join the meeting
Please add: Tony McCormick resigns from the board.
It’s been fun being part of the community for so many years (14+). My business and my future plans for a segment of the EHR business have taken me in some new paths with some old and new friends. My company will continue to provide professional support services and hosting for OpenEMR users as well as developement on the fork we have started at http://libreehr.github.io.
I have always encouraged forks and almost never gotten those companies that forked to truly open source their work. That will not be the case with the LibreEHR, it will be a fully FOSS.
I am happy the the new Board has a new vigor to make big changes to OpenEMR and I’m sure it will be successful.
I’m surprised by Tony’s move to leave OpenEMR and started a new system. Why can’t everyone work together to improve it? It took almost 3 years for OpenEMR to get meaningful use certified. Now with the breakup of community contributors, the next phase will be much harder.
The current OpenEMR Chair is also promoting their own BlueEHS.
I still think there is an abundance of community spirit, which is what brings me back to this project every day. As a volunteer on the project, I also think everyone should work together to improve OpenEMR, and like yourself, I was also disappointed. Note this is just 1 community contributor of many (that has brought very minimal contributions to OpenEMR over the last 1 year), so the actual affect of this on OpenEMR’s future success and flight to future MU3 certification will be very minimal.
Regarding BlueEHS(ZH Healthcare), the failure of the OpenEMR community (of which I take some responsibility for), to get MU2 certified in time caused many of the vendors to need to create their own MU2 branded products in order to support their customers needs. It is important to point out that BLueEHS(ZH Healthcare)'s amount of free contributed code into the OpenEMR codebase over the last 5 years is many times higher than any other vendor. On MU2 alone, you can see their relative contributions, which were free and also fulfilled several very important items: http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/OpenEMR_Certification_Stage_II_Meaningful_Use#Acknowledgments
The OEMR organization is different from the OpenEMR project. The OEMR organization’s primary mission is to support the OpenEMR project, support OpenEMR’s roadmap, and to function as the business entity for maintaining MU certifications; one example of this support recently is paying $1K for the new OpenEMR website. This OEMR organization was essentially resurrected this year with the hard work of several committed individuals; and we are still in the process of laying a healthy fundation within this organization, so it can meet the needs of the OpenEMR project in the future. The OEMR organization is inclusive to all including all stakeholders of the OpenEMR project and does not prejudice against professionals or vendors; the list of current board members is here:
Note that OEMR does have mechanisms in place to avoid conflict of interest. For example, the MU3 charter that will be used to choose which contractors OEMR’s decided to fund will relegate decisions to several volunteers.
Regarding evidence of ongoing community spirit(ie. focusing on the positives):
The MU2 effort has been salvaged (this effort was not looking good about 6 months ago) and will happen any day now.
There continues to be an abundance of free help on the forums
There has been an uptick in new developers joining the project
The development(ie. commits and new feature) of the project is simply starting to shoot through the roof. If anything, the community is actually getting overwhelmed on this front.
hope this helps some and hang in there, things will only get better ,
-brady OpenEMR
I’m surprised by Tony’s move to leave OpenEMR and started a new system. Why can’t everyone work together to improve it? It took almost 3 years for OpenEMR to get meaningful use certified. Now with the breakup of community contributors, the next phase will be much harder.
The current OpenEMR Chair is also promoting their own BlueEHS.
Just to be clear. I resigned from the board of OEMR due to business reasons. I did NOT fork OpenEMR, I was asked by Dr Sam Bowen, a long time supporter of OpenEMR and longtime friend and customer of mine to help him with a LibreEHR (which was already a fork). LibreEHR is a fork, but so is BlueEHR, Dr Cloud, OpenEMR-Pro, PeaceCorp’s PCMEDICS and at least 25 others that I (and others) have helped white label and rebrand and otherwise spread the “OpenEMR Inside” model I have always supported.
The OEMR now has a very solid board (instead of just me!) hurray. Lot’s of good stuff here. OpenEMR has legs for the long haul and MU2 can only help that.
LibreEHR is a project that is taking the best core things about OpenEMR and gutting all the fat and is NOT going to be backwards compatible with OpenEMR. This is not about trying to take OpenEMR users, it’s a new direction for a different user base.
If nothing else, I hope that LibreEMR is to OpenEMR as io.js is to node.js [0]. As long as semver [1] is respected, I don’t see any reason why major breaking changes from LibreEMR -> OpenEMR merges would be discouraged.