drbowen wrote on Sunday, June 12, 2005:
I have been using OpenEMR since 1-1-2004. I estimate it is saving me about $80,000 a year in transription fees, employee benefits, paper, and toner. My productivity has increased dramatically so that I am seeing more people and keeping up with my charting and getting on time more.
The original code was developed at
http://www.synitech.com/
The last verison I have seen from Synitech is 2.0. I started with version 1.7.
Walt Pennington of PennigntonFirm and his employees made many major alterations and additions to the code and published versions 2.0+ through 2.7.1.
David Uhlman has moved on from PenningtonFirm and started his own company Uversa, and has started developing ClearHealth. He has been joined there by the John Trotter.
David Uhlman and John Trotter have borrowed some code from FreeMed and OpenEMR (the parts they liked) and have written everthing else from scratch. John Trotter was the lead developer of FreeB 1.0. FreeB is being rewritten in PHP (instead of PERL) and reportedly is a major part of ClearHealth.
Back to OpenEMR.
I have only implemented the EMR portion and have not tried to go live with the billing portion.
>How difficult is it to implement it ?
The EMR portion is easy. The billing part is hard.
I run linux in my production environment. The thing that attracted me to OpenEMR in the first place was the clean uncluttered look and it was the easiest open source solution to install.
I installed the EMR portion yesterday on my Windows 2003 server. It went as easy as linux and seems to working flawlessly. I did not have to make any special modifications. I am working on writing a Windows HOWTO today for the EMR portion. I am hoping to publish this later today on the SourceForge forums and also in the wiki at:
http://www.oemr.org/OenEMRWiki
>Can the previous balances be transfered via an script, who
>can help with it ?
Nikolai Vitsyn here in my office does this kind of work on the side. Writing this type of script depends somewhat on how clean the data is in your existing system How the data is stored etc. Which billing system are you running and how is the data stored?
There are others around who have the skill to do this. Several of whom are doing this commercially. Try this link:
http://www.openemr.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewforum&f=5&sid=842cd6e07d8b4edf0304819f25d8e46c
>What would happen to the previous database if they change it
>later on, specially the office visits ?
>
We have had little trouble migrating each version to the newer ones. The system is very modular and the forms from the older version seem to be perfectly at home with the newer versions.
Migration usually involves writing a script that maps the old tables onto the new tables. None of the old data is lost. Usually there are just some new colums in a small portion of the tables.
As an example: the "encounter table" has two new columns that allows post-dating of visits. This is usually necessary in posting hospital charges because the practitioner is frequently turning in the chrges after the date on which they occured. The addition of the two new date fields in no way changes the way the old data is stored or works.
The developers are very cognizant of the problem of introducing changes that interfere with the way old data is kept. Tekkno Genius is a SQL database expert and very cautious about this. He is contemplating making some significant database changes that should make the whole sytem cleaner and faster. The first thing he did was to raise the option for public comment before he considered making any changes at all.
Do you have an IT person working with you or are you "hacking" it on your own?
I’ve been working on documentation so I’m trying to write up step by step procedures for everything I do.
>Juan " a lost pediatircian "
>
We were all lost when we first started.
Sam Bowen