OpenEMR's Response to COVID-19

KEY POINTS :

  • OpenEMR anticipates minimal impacts to the projects’ code contribution and release cycles
  • OpenEMR’s Infrastructure Team is prepared to address any potential upstream downtime
  • End-users seeking additional functionality, please contact covid19response@open-emr.org or this forum category

This is a cross-post of https://open-emr.org/covid19 which will always contain the latest information regarding our response

[MONDAY 2020-03-16 Update]
As the spread of the COVID-19 has reached pandemic levels, the OpenEMR Foundation and community, like so many healthcare organizations and healthcare support systems, remain vigilant of global public health concerns. Given the distributed nature of our community, we anticipate minimal impact to the project in terms of code contribution and community support. Our infrastructure team has contingency plans in place to mitigate any potential downtime to production servers, which include key community applications such as our forums at https://community.open-emr.org as a result of upstream workforce shortages.

Additionally, OpenEMR leadership is taking steps to engage the current user base to assess any immediate EMR functionality that may impede investigation, testing, and reporting. Leadership is closely monitoring latest recommendations from both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as World Health Organization in crafting tools to aid frontline healthcare workers.

For OpenEMR Users , if you are in need of specific forms or reports to more easily comply with reporting requests, you can reach out for assistance on our forums or by emailing covid19response@open-emr.org or by posting in this forum. While the OpenEMR community is a passionate group, we are volunteers. This means that we cannot guarantee solutions to every need but will do our best to accommodate needs directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic as expeditiously as possible.

For Developers , if you are interested in assisting with rapid development needs to assist frontline staff, please reach out to covid19response@open-emr.org with the subject DEVELOPER or posting in this forum.

For everyone else wanting to assist , we encourage you to make a tax-deductible financial donation to OpenEMR to assist in continued development of key features to improve global health epidemiology as well as making a donation to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

Lastly, we encourage everyone to follow their local health agencies recommendations, which include routinely washing your hands for at least 20-seconds.

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With COVID-19 changing every aspect of life including practicing medicine I have few questions:
1- Telemedicine seems to be the new way of practice across the board for physicians especially for continuity of care , is there any link to the forms that were worked on to address documenting video/phone conferencing and consultation of patients, mainly forms?
2- Any specific ICD-10/SNOMED codes added to address this aspect of practicing medicine?
3- Any work in progress about including patient portal that links to OpenEMR that will deal with documenting, saving video/audio consult with patients Telehealth/telemedicine type?