mukoya wrote on Sunday, December 26, 2010:
Kind of newbie (with openEMR).
Thanks a lot and keep up your great work.
Second time to install OEMR. First time, 4months ago, din’t like 3.2 user interface and dismissed it… Been busy testing many other EHRs out there. Was not impressed much with available open source EMRs.
Came back and decided to try 4.0. Great work going on! Have been testing it and it is great. The IPPF documentation included makes one discover great functionality that is easily missed at first.
Been scrolling through the forums -especially development (though I am no developer)- and I am Impressed by whatever is in the pipeline - especially, for me, the (further) UI improvements. Cant wait for a IU akin to the mockup earlier posted.
One issue I thought you could consider in future releases that I have found useful in other EHRs is discretion in scheduling.
The way one vendor did it is, in place of providers, put resources. These resources could be, for example, Diabetic Clinic, Room 12, Dr. John, etc. This is useful in situations where several providers work in one clinic but their individual schedules are not fixed.
Another issue is tracking and tagging of patients. For example, at reception, the receptionist could add a patient to the vitals room Queue with a tag of “Urgent”, often displayed as a different color on the patient list from, say Routine or very urgent/emergency. After vitals, the staff, eg nurse, then deliberately adds the patient on the physicians queue etc. these queues are specific to service areas and could include laboratory, pharmacy etc and are visible on the UI. the view can be rearranged based waiting time, urgency etc. Currently, this functionality is partially achieved by visit status and chart tracking.
This has been mentioned here: popups for office notes (if they are what i think they are). This, in my view is a very powerful functionality that may even be used in workflow, e.g physician to laboratory (I am yet to fully understand the procedures module- if i can call it that- and related workflow).
All in all, I think this is easily the most feature-rich and user friendly free EHR out there. Looking foward to the official 4.0, hopefully with the new UI! Will be monitoring GIT too.
Mukoya.