I seek recommendations for optimal configuration of a single Oemr instance hosted for student use in a graduate course in EHRs & Coding Systems, to be run this fall by the NJIT Department of Computer Science… Each student requires access to a set of sample patient records, but we want to shield students from each other’s changes. How can this be done in a single instance of Oemr? (We seek to make a good showing here as as NJIT is NJ’s regional center for fed funded EHR implementations.) Thanks for your advice.
Could just stick a customized OpenEMR Appliance on each computer? Could download the current OpenEMR Appliance and customize it for your purposes. Then could simply copy this onto each computer.
What I have done for various educational institutions is have them designate a server. Install VMware Server 2.x (Free) and then install whatever # of Virtual instances of OpenEMR as needed. Each student or group would then point their burowsers to a specific instance and thus keep them apart. And much easier to manage. I also snapshot them to day one of cl ass come the end of the course/semester they get restored to that restore point. And for licensing reasons we use OpenSuSe (lots of hardware drivers) for the VMServer and Ubuntu for the OpenEMR VMachines.
aperezcrespo,
That’s an even better solution to consolidate all appliances on one server (this is how the openemr online demos work). Out of curiosity, how many instances have you run at once? And when you say instance do you manually create them (ie. copy them and register them to the vmware server) or is there a way to have vmware server create the instance for you.
-brady
Yes I do manually copy the to different directories and register them (a new MAC is auto generated for each on).
I have dropped the VM guests memory down to 128MB and have been able to run up to 6 on a 1GB PC and 12 on a 2GB PC. More memory more instances. Of course Network bottlenecks could be a problem, so have a good NIC.
Set the guests to DHCP.
Most importantly NO GUI anywhere Not on host Not on guests/Instances.
As far as snapshots. Snapshot the first one for day one and use that one for copies.
Off hand I don’t know how to get VM to create new guests/instances.
We use CentOS and hardware-assisted kernal virtualization (KVM) which we find is ~ 40% more efficent than other VM architectures. We are providing a dedicated instance to each of about 40-50 students this fall, in undergraduate and graduate level courses. We will be guest lecturing, developing lesson plans and leading OpenEMR-labs for students in these courses. We do not have the skill to concoct realistic sample patient data. Our challange is to secure and de-identify a live patient database for deployment in the student instances.