tmccormi wrote on Thursday, July 28, 2011:
Today the volunteers of OEMR.org will spend some 4+ hours with the staff of ICSA Labs testing all the remaining modules of OpenEMR version 4.1 in an attempt to achieve full EHR certification for Meaningful Use. This testing will occur into the wee hours of Eastern Standard time.
We hope to be able to complete everything tonight and Selvi’s team at Vicare/Visolve are again the team for this and are very well prepared. Whether we get completely done without any issues tonight or not, the follow up to complete the process will be prompt and we are sure that we will be fully certified in the next couple of weeks at the outside.
Getting here has been a long road, more than a year, and there are many people to thank. I hope I don’t miss anyone, but here’s my attempt in alphabetical order. If I miss anyone please post a note and remind us. Also note: this list is specifically about the parts of version 4.1 that are certification requirements and processes. There is an even longer list of contributors to enhancements, bug fixes and new features for OpenEMR that we will recognize as part of the 4.1.0 release process that will follow.
Sam Bowen, MD had the foresight to invest more than $200,000 into this effort at the very beginning of the process. He used those funds to pay programmers, project management and to fund the servers and infrastructure for our MU development (SVN repository) and our wiki. This was not enough money to do the whole project, but it got us to about 1/3 and, more importantly, energized the community to support and contribute going forward. Some of the development teams he contracted with continue to donate staff time and effort to this day.
Michael Brody, DPM acted as our ONC Meaningful Use consultant and paid for the syndromic surveillance registry reporting. It would have been very difficult to understand the government requirements without his help and direct advocacy with ONC and CCHIT originally. His contributions allowed us to get started even before the rules were finalized.
ClinicDoctor (cassilup) - Almost at the last hour we discovered this commercial reseller and noticed that they had a live built in patient portal. They agreed to contribute a version of that portal that would run entirely inside OpenEMR and meet the MU criteria.
Ensoftek (DrCloud) contributed staff to work with mi-squared on clinical decision rules, automated measure calculations and patient reminders as well as clinical quality measure reporting and immunization register reporting.
Garden State Health contributed expertise and programmers to develop the CCR and CCD core modules that allow OpenEMR to meet many of the certification criteria around patient medical records sharing, both with the patients and with referrals. Thanks specifically to John Williams and Micheal Firilolo.
Medical Information Integration (mi-squared) contributed overall project management from the beginning. Additionally, staff from mi-squared, including Aron Racho and Ken Chapple contributed significant parts of the clinical rules, clinical quality measures, automated measure calculations, patient reminders, document encryption and integrity modules. Jeremy Wallace wrote interfaces and improvements to the “procedures” tools to work with Lab Exchanges to meet the “incorporate lab results” requirement. Jason Brooks put many hours into maintaining and improving OEMR web, wiki and repository servers and Sara McCormick maintains the User Guides.
Brady Miller has contributed more time to this project (and OpenEMR as whole) than actually exists in this time continuum. Brady wrote many of core parts of the ONC requirements including clinical decision rules engine, automated measure calculations, widgets for displaying that information, reports, rule sets, and more. But all of that pales to the tireless effort in reviewing contributed code from ALL of us, merging and testing that code and offering keen insights into ways to solve complex issues in a system that is now more than 600,000 lines of code. Brady gets the MVP award in my book.
MRSB, LTD – for contributing a lawyer (Greg Neumann) so that we could get OEMR recognized as a 501©(3). This allowed us to be able to make contracts with the certification body, ICSA Labs, without which we would not be able to be registered or get certification at all as an open source project. The rest of the world requires a legal entity to work with.
Phyaura contributed code to help integrate RxNorm and SNOMED coding requirements which are used in CCR/CCD and in clinical quality reporting.
Sunset Systems, Rod Roark, contributed the procedures/orders system that has been used to meet the “incorporate lab results” requirement as well as helping review and advise on contributed code.
Z&H Healthcare Services has contributed the completion of the CCR/CCD modules and development of the NewCrop e-RX interface to meet the CPOE requirements. They also contributed a very complete patient portal option can been used in this test if required and does meet all the requirements as an optional solution for those clinics that do not want to manage their own portal access.
Vicare+/Visolve – Selvi’s team has been the mainstay of the team by being the sole formal Quality Assurance group. This group are experts at interpreting the NIST testing criteria and working out what needs to be adjusted, fixed or redone to make it possible for us to pass these onerous tests. They are the best organized and we could not have done this without their contributions. Their team also developed all of the required security modules, we wouldn’t even have been able to start the testing without these components: Password policies, audit logging, client certificates, emergency access, recording disclosures, HIPAA de-identification, consent management.
Finally, the community at large. OEMR is proud to have a group of people that care, that download the development code base, test it, identify issues quickly, contribute patches to fix small bugs, write FAQs and help each other. It is amazing to see and amazing to be part of.
Thank you all!
OEMR.org 501©(3)
Custodial Agent for OpenEMR