bradymiller wrote on Friday, September 23, 2011:
Hi,
Did a lot of refactoring on the project website at www.open-emr.org for the release. I tried to take a stab at defining and convincing users to consider open source EMRs. Please feel free to let me know your thoughts (bad and good) on the content of this page. Note also that submissions for modifications to this site can be done via the following github repository:
http://github.com/bradymiller/website-openemr
thanks,
-brady
OpenEMR
jcahn2 wrote on Friday, September 23, 2011:
Ahoy Brady,
Suggestion for the wording beginning at sentence # 4 under “What is Open Source” beginning “Rather than…”
Commercial companies compete with each other and software solutions must be invented anew for each company which wastes valuable resources. In contrast, open source communities and companies collaborate their resources to build software much more efficiently.
Jack oemr.org
bradymiller wrote on Saturday, September 24, 2011:
Hi Jack,
Thanks for the feedback. I incorporated your suggestion on the ww.open-emr.org site (note you will likely need to ‘refresh’ the page in your web browser to see the new change).
thanks,
-brady
OpenEMR
bradymiller wrote on Saturday, September 24, 2011:
Hi,
Also, as part of the refactoring at the project website at www.open-emr.org, we have also migrated the wiki there. This allowed us to fully integrate the wiki within the website at open-emr.org. Because of this, users that want to modify the wiki will need to create new logins (sorry for the hassle).
thanks,
-brady
tmccormi wrote on Monday, September 26, 2011:
Brady,
Hassle indeed.
You did that (copied the wki) with out consulting the community or asking the OEMR if you could, thereby removing all our our admin access to your copy. Seems out of character for you. And frankly I disagree with the move entirely. A complete waste of everyones time to do something the was already working using a URL line to openmedsoftware.org/wiki (aka wiki.oemr.org).
**Community: Your user ids are all still intact at original wiki location, I suggest others express their opinion about this action.
**
-Tony
julialongtin wrote on Monday, September 26, 2011:
To whom it may concern:
I will express my opinion through action. I will continue to improve/debug the form generator, to enable its functionality for all users. I have had a rough history with most of the individuals in charge of merges in the OpenEMR tree, and having to register yet-again due to an obvious power struggle is another headache I will be opting out of.
I’ve been doing a lot of technology development around OpenEMR (the CreateVM interface at faikvm.com, which generates instances for development in less than 6 minutes), and am currently working on a paper form sorting system, to accelerate the importing of paper documentation into OpenEMR. I had to fight tooth and nail to get the XML form generator into the OpenEMR tree, because of a HEAVY ‘not invented here’ syndrome on the part of developers targeting windows.
I’m supposed to magically test for operating systems I DO NOT OWN, and will not agree to the license to. This is too high of a barrier of entry, for me.
Let me know who is accepting patches, and i will continue to provide patches. You will find me maintaining documentation on the OpenMedSoftware wiki, where we *all* agreed to.
Brady, I am pleased you’re able to make use of the work the community has placed in the openmedsoftware wiki. I will not be using YET ANOTHER interface to communicate with the OpenEMR project, when we have all agreed to a very fine one, that has NO complaints, from what I’ve heard.
These sourceforge forums are such a bother… I really don’t even know what I’m doing getting involved in them yet again.
I like the other forum better.
My work is for all. It is unfortunate that I have received such high resistance to my works in this project, that I have basically given up contributing to the code at all. I’m better off writing tools for OpenEMR’s prospective users, as I am not allowed a ‘real’ contributing role on this project. I realize my technologies are strange… but the reception I have had of them has been far less than desirable.
Julia Longtin
sunsetsystems wrote on Monday, September 26, 2011:
Just to clarify one thing. As one might expect with an open source project, the wiki appears to be freely copyable as it announces that its content is subject to the GNU Free Documentation License.
bradymiller wrote on Monday, September 26, 2011:
Tony,
I also have no clue what you are talking about regarding the admin access stuff; it is a public wiki with GNU FDL licensed content, and I saw no sensitive information on the several hundred pages I imported. If I am mistaken (which I highly doubt), then please actually point to something (and I’ll fix it).
Both Rod and myself send a letter to the OEMR organization, including yourself, for our reasons for migrating the wiki. Since you’d rather debate this move publicly, then I’ll simply paste myself and Rod’s letter to your organization in the next post:
bradymiller wrote on Monday, September 26, 2011:
Role of OEMR in the OpenEMR Project
by Brady Miller and Rod Roark
September 23, 2011
OpenEMR was originally developed by Synitech and version 1.0 was released in June of 2001 as MP Pro (MedicalPractice Professional). Much of the code was then reworked, and the product was re-introduced as OpenEMR version 1.3 a year later, in June 2002. It became an open source project and was registered on SourceForge.net on August 13, 2002.
OpenEMR was primarily maintained by the Pennington Firm from January of 2004 until March of 2005, whereupon its development was turned over to the community and its administration was accepted by Rod Roark, Andres Paglayan and Tekkno Genius. Andres and Tekkno eventually took other directions and were replaced by Brady Miller in August of 2009. So at this time Rod and Brady are the project’s co-administrators.
The OEMR organization was the brainchild of Dr. Sam Bowen of Hickory, NC. It became a North Carolina corporation in July of 2010 with the goal of supporting the OpenEMR project. It achieved status with the IRS as a 501©(3) nonprofit in November of 2010. The idea seemed to be to generate revenues through grants and member donations to fund improvements to OpenEMR. To support these activities, Rod donated the oemr.org domain name to the nonprofit.
As of this writing it appears the OEMR Board of Directors consists of about 10 individuals, most of whom are vendors of OpenEMR-related products and/or services, and a couple of whom are associates of Dr. Bowen in legal and accounting roles.
While grateful to receive support from the nonprofit and for its important role in ONC certification, we are a bit disappointed that the vendors who control OEMR are using the oemr.org domain to duplicate functionality of the OpenEMR project, notably its forums. We are also disappointed that the organization seems to be billing itself as a focal point for OpenEMR development, when in fact it is not and never has been. OpenEMR’s name, reputation and success were all built at its home on SourceForge.
We do not support such duplication and find that it is disruptive to the project as a whole. The nonprofit cannot represent the OpenEMR community until is has a substantial membership base from that community, where the members are normal OpenEMR users (e.g. doctors and clinic managers) with the power to elect its Board. OEMR needs to focus on building membership to live up to its standing as a nonprofit and to its goal of taking advantage of its tax-free status to earn grants, and dues and donations from members.
Consistent with this position and our desire to protect the integrity of the project’s documentation, we have migrated the OpenEMR wiki from the oemr.org domain to the OpenEMR project website at http://www.open-emr.org/.
We welcome OEMR as a supporter of the project and hope that the OEMR Board will take its 501©(3) fiduciary responsibilities seriously and focus on building its membership, holding itself accountable to that membership, and bringing on grant-writing talent. To posture as representing the project itself is, at this time, misleading and destructive. We are optimistic that in the future, OEMR with a “real” membership base will be able to take on an important leadership role in the project’s development.
bradymiller wrote on Monday, September 26, 2011:
Julia,
I’m sorry you feel such resistance for contributing your work. I was aware of the initial resistance to your xmlformgenerator code, but I attributed that to the reviewing developer’s (myself) learning curve regarding xml/xslt and need to test it out (note I am not a pro and it was something I had to learn before reviewing/committing it). I hope since then, you have not felt any resistance in your work. Contributions are still done in the same way (github/gitorius/etc.) and announcing in the ‘Code Review’ tracker or on the Developer forum at sourceforge.
Note we have two apparent active xmlformgen bugs that we would love your help on:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3391969&group_id=60081&atid=493001
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=493001&aid=3405323&group_id=60081
Note also we have an active thread discussing a way to get a new forum (that integrates both traditional forum use for new users and mailing list functionality for seasoned developers):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openemr/forums/forum/202506/topic/4630751
thanks,
-brady
bradymiller wrote on Monday, September 26, 2011:
Hi Julia,
I also noticed you discussing this functionality above “am currently working on a paper form sorting system, to accelerate the importing of paper documentation into OpenEMR”. Were you aware of this feature (note, I wasn’t even aware of it) in this thread described by Sandra (gutiersa ) at Administration->Practice->Documents to import documents on a large scale, which appears to now be broken:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openemr/forums/forum/202505/topic/4696598
-brady
julialongtin wrote on Monday, September 26, 2011:
Brady,
I’m currently fighting the xmlformgen bugs… at least one of them i’m quite aware of, and the other is a review of some code that does have one bug in it. I intend to fix them both in one swipe.
As for the incoming paper form sorter, I’m looking at attaching GNU GIFT to the incoming fax system, so that incoming forms can be recognized, a field can be identified, and while the software does not do OCR, it will compare signatures, so its quite possible to set it up to pick out a client’s name on a form, and automatically place it in the documents/, with a message to a practitioner to look over the (now properly placed) document. This is not to replace any aspect of the documents system, but rather remove human handling. I’ve performed all of these steps separately, manually.
Its true that i haven’t been paying much attention to openemr related issues, due to the general resistance i described above. My code is written for everyone, and i will be glad to redouble my efforts to use the established procedures for entry…
I’m expecting to have these bugs killed off, and a new front-end on my createvm software (the backend for 0 to openemr instance has been WELL tested at this point) so that authenticated users can instantiate a VM sometime this week. I’ve been concentrating on the GNU GIFT plugin, as obviously, this is an area where i’m a subject expert, being the maintainer of the software, and having used it in the banking industry long before joining up with OpenEMR. Image recognition that is not OCR will not be something easy to integrate, or for others to come up to speed on.
I’m working hard on getting a GNU GIFT demo set up again, as i’ve recently taken over as maintainer of the software… and it needs quite a bit of care, and a new web frontend for the types of functions we need out of it. in ways, i’ve been neglecting OpenEMR related stuff, to get this out the door, given that i have both OpenEMR and non-EMR uses… It also excites me greatly to think of form recognition funtioning for OpenEMR users everywhere, as this is a feature i have never even heard of someone else having.
I’ve always felt that I had to ‘badger people into’ accepting my code on this project. perhaps that is a bad assumption, I am willing to set aside for now. I have always worked on ‘esoteric’ technologies, so I react strongly to “wait, wait, let me understand this!”. many people never do, or throw their hands up in disgust at my solutions. That’s why the xml form generator still stands alone; its quite possible to merge with layouts, if we can agree on some common datatypes, but i have not wanted to ‘rock the boat’, as its historically the one rocking it that gets kicked off.
I also historically have not liked watching others’ large patches go in, while my comparitively small one gets inspected so heavily. this has lead to a perception by me that there are some who can just land whatever, while i have to jump to a higher, undefined bar. While there is now an established procedure for review, i still percieve this, possibly erronously, i’m certainly willing to take arguments on the subject.
After reading your letter posted above, i still do not understand why you are abandoning the openmedsoftware wiki. it really smells powergrabish to me, and thus i’m going to need further explination before abandoning infrastructure that represented a great step forward for our community. it seems strange to complain about duplication (with a tool that is FAR superior to these forums, IMO), then duplicate something needlessly.
I look forward to continuing to develop and provide more features to the community. it is my hope that in the future, the barriers between us do not continue to build.
Julia Longtin
bradymiller wrote on Monday, September 26, 2011:
Hi Julia,
Again, I’m sorry you even think there are barriers for submitting code. We’ve had the code review process for some time now and I think I even took the time to commit your patches myself into github previously for review and went out of my way to get your stuff committed at that time:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3158607&group_id=60081&atid=1245239
Again, to repeat, there is no barrier here; with so many cool projects that you are working on, please, please, please just submit your code for review.
-brady
julialongtin wrote on Thursday, September 29, 2011:
Again, to all concerned:
I have set up a demonstration of GNU GIFT at http://faikvm.com:8008/index.php .
This is the OpenClipArt collection. I’m working on getting a large set of forms to play with, so we can practice using it to sort medical forms.
If it breaks, reply to this and i’ll set it back up. its very fragile code.
to play with it, hit ‘random’, and pick something that catches your eye. select plus (the one on the left if it renders wrong), and hit ‘query’.
to do subqueries, select pluses and minuses on more objects and hit ‘refine’.
Yes, the flow is all broken, and there are duplicate buttons. I’m importing the code into git as we speak.
Let me know what you think!
Julia Longtin
bradymiller wrote on Thursday, September 29, 2011:
Hi Julia,
Pretty nifty; interesting differences between the Classical IDF and Separate Normalization. Reminds me of a android app I played with that would pull pictures/art of the web that resembled a picture you took. Looking forward to see what it does with forms/documents.
-brady
julialongtin wrote on Thursday, September 29, 2011:
Brady,
one of my students showed me that app the other day. indeed, it works as you describe… altho this takes positive AND negative results, is free software, and we really want to use it in a series of queues… all documents of this type into this queue… now cut out the signature field, and see what matches the signatures we have on file… and in this way, we can take an incoming form from a random client (who we’ve seen before), match their signature, and place it in the documents system, with a note sent to a provider to review the document.
I see many, many uses for this in sorting questionaires into the proper places, even prospectively reading the checkboxes, and automatically filling in an encounter-form.
Exciting stuff.
Julia Longtin
paradocs wrote on Friday, September 30, 2011:
Greetings all!
As new here I celebrate that this is a great lively project.
Encouraging many levels of contributers is a real plus.
Although it may be redundant with “OpenEMR Users”, a category
“Tips and Ideas, Show Us How You Use OpenEMR” may be useful to
post ideas with out expectation of question / answer but rather
to hatch creative thought. Allowing one to show off ideas
and getting a pat on the back may help with your stated goal
of “convincing users to consider open source EMRs.”
Hi Julia, that looks like a cool project to help with our mountain
of paper. We tend to keep every thing since it to too expensive to
weed out exact duplicates, copies saying signature pending, and the
electronically signed copy.
Best Wishes
paradocs David Marc Tan Creti, M. D.
bradymiller wrote on Saturday, October 01, 2011:
Hi,
Making that forum category sounds like a good and fun idea. I like the title you propose also; anybody else want to submit other title ideas for this type of forum category.
-brady