bradymiller wrote on Sunday, September 04, 2016:
Hi General Lee,
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