OpenEMR in the Acute, Inpatient Setting

Management and Administration
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There has long been discussion about using OpenEMR in the acute, inpatient setting. I am interested in speaking with anybody who is using OpenEMR in this environment.

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Hi @robert.down -

The short answer is, to my knowledge very few outfits actually use OpenEMR for inpatient.

I have done Customer Support for an OpenEMR (CE) vendor since 2014 and that subject has come up frequently- like, once a month or so- from providers asking us how to use this wonderfully customizable OpenEMR in an inpatient setting. Generally, they see how much of the EMR would need to be augmented with newly coded inpatient- specific functionality, and how much that would cost, and I never hear from them again.

The few places I have heard of who do use it tend to be small clinics overseas who use the Inventory/ Dispensary with the Prescriptions module and have cobbled together a bunch of LBFs to meet their peculiar needs. But that’s just barely better than doing everything with paper charts.

One of the big stumbling blocks as you know, is the lack of an integrated MAR and the support functionalities it requires. I am in talks with a potential customer who is contemplating funding a rudimentary MAR interface that would record med administration and create reports but leave the heavy lifting of medication ordering/ safety checks/ pharmacy communications to commercial eRx applications. So it wouldn’t be a standalone, fully functional MAR but it would be half way there.

Best- Harley

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Hello. I made a module for inpatients, assigning beds in room, floor and area. Several customers are using it with good results.

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Do you have a demo available?

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Hello. Check https://medical-records.net/openinterna user is user33 and pass user33 … There will be an option in the menu called Inpatient Options, where there are the features. I will send a Powerpoint demo in a while.

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See a PowerPoint at https://free-emr-system.com/Inpatient Module.pps

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7

Thank you for sharing

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Hi, I’m currently in the process of implementing OpenEMR in a setting that handles both out- and inpatients.
Here is link to a quick demo i set up just for this post:

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@Ajospace -
That’s v impressive- very mature, nicely designed and well- behaved interface.
Some questions that occurred to me:

  • How does it handle medications and get the administration information, does it use the native pharmacy/ dispensary module?
  • Does it have an actual Medication Administration Record (MAR), showing the past doses given for each patient?
  • Do the financial functions replace the ‘Fee’ menu items, or could the encounter fee sheet and the Payment and Checkout menu items still be used?
  • Is the Dutch hard- coded or are you using OpenEMR’s native translation tables? How difficult would it be to convert it to English?

Again, congratulations on a very attractive modification of OpenEMR and thanks for sharing it.

  • Harley
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Hi @sergiors -
That’s a v ambitious project, looks quite comprehensive. Have you made any progress with a MAR module?

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Looking through this forum I see another page with mentions of multiple cases where folks have added inpatient capabilities of varying complexity to OpenEMR.

Interestingly, the one functionality they all lack is a MAR…

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Congratulations !!! Its really good one.

Did you use the standalone OpenEMR as I see this version is not the latest 7.0 rather 5.0

Any specific reasons for selecting an older version of it ??

Regards,
Ayesha

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@htuck

Thank you for your kind and empowering feedback. To answer the questions:

  • The system allows you to manage different inventories. Medicine is one type, but with some special behaviors. Stockmanagement and transactions comes from the plugged in POS and does not use what comes with OpenEMR. Administration (meaning user rights) info is pulled from the OpenEMR install. Administration (meaning stock & transactions related) info is pulled from the POS. But medications can only be given to a patient if their insurance covers that medication or if the patient has provided an alternative method of payment. Otherwise it won’t show up in the POS for that patient. So there info is pulled from both systems.
  • Hm no, a MAR was not among the requested features, but I think now it should be :wink: As a sidenote, I had to replace the built in Prescription module with a simpler one that better fit the situation. Our situation is that all the insurance companies here have their own pre-printed prescription forms, so I needed to be able to print the right way depending on the patients insurance company.
  • The financial functions are used in place of the built in ones. But since they work independent of each other, they could probably be used side by side.
  • Some of the Dutch is hard-coded, and but most uses the built in translations functions that OpenEMR offers. It’s should not be to hard to translate it though, because almost all added functionality comes from files that all sit in a special folder. And then… there are some hard-coded adaptations to a few core OpenEMR files, but these are not to hard to manage.
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@AyeshaMuss
Thank you for you kind feedback.
There was no specific reason for using and older version here. I just chose one random localhost to make a quick video, but the code runs well in 7 too.

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Thanks very much for your efforts and i love the interface, Is the code free to have or it is commercial if yes please let me know

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Glad you like the interface @Natt_SL_Limited,
The code is distributed to the client under the same license as OpenEMR, with no limitations of any kind other than specified in the GNU General Public License v3.0. However the code is not being made publicly available for free download, until we move everything into modules that can be installed from within OpenEMR. For now, there are other options to obtain the code.

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Thanks very much for the swift response, i am very much keen on the the way you do some custom changes on the fonts and colours ,it will be of good if you can share some tips in that

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@Ajospace i will like to know also how you are able to change the login background

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Hi, so like with everything OpenEMR, there are different ways to approach that, ranging from “quick&dirty, but it works” to “doing things the right way”. If you just want to change some UI related stuff, like fonts and color, rolling out your own theme might be the cleanest way to do that. Here is a video showing one way to do that, hope it helps.

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@Ajospace Thanks very much you have saved us, we want to appreciate you so much and we hope and pray this basic tutorials continue.