Perhaps there is somebody who can help me figure out why I am unable to enable (successfully) patient notification of reminders by email. I have struggled with this and have searched the forums for clues.
I have OpenEMR 4.1.1 on an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server. I have some patients set up with email address and proper hipaa permissions in their patient accounts. I have an SMTP mail server by my ISP. This works from a command line (HELO etc) on my server with the telnet to port 25 without need for a password. From any other location port 25 is not functional and only the heavy duty protocols are available.
If I use batch.com feature of OpenEMR, I can get emails to go out properly to patients with appointments in certain ranges.
When I create patient reminders using various criteria, I get a screen display of items awaiting notification, with indicdation for example that some are authorized for email. But when I click the button to act upon this, it works for a while but creates no display and sends no email.
I know it has to be something simple I am overlooking but I sure can’t find it. Any ideas?
Aha! I can stop pulling my hair out for the moment. Seems to me it was working fine for me a year or two ago. In my struggle, I learned a lot about how this all works.
Playing around with OpenEMR makes my work an interesting challenge and is much of the reason I’m not even thinking of retiring.
5, 7 and 8 were basically completed. Regarding 5, email was completed, but not the PHONE/SMS hooks. Pretty sure the email of clinical reminders is working; here’s a thread recently regarding this where user got it to work: http://sourceforge.net/p/openemr/discussion/202505/thread/f1d2d03d/
Regarding OpenEMR version, are you using a patch of 4.1.1 (note the basic 4.1.1 without most recent patch has serious issues with report/reminder performance with larger practices). Also check out my post in that thread to ensure you have globals and alerts page settings set correctly.
I am a little behind with the OpenEMR patches because I have a number of hand edited customizations that get written over when I do a patch. So today I set up a new spare server from scratch with an Ubuntu 12.04 alternative iso and a fresh installation of the newest stable version of OpenEMR. I encrypted the entire hard drive at the time of installation and plan to tighten up the server security with the help of Ubuntu Secure Server script. Daily DVD backups will record automatically and will be encrypted.
At this point I plan to make all the necessary hand edits and see if the email notifications start to work.
If necessary, I can run on this spare server and eventually reinstall everything fresh on the heavy duty main one.
With this kind of leap frogging I don’t expect to get into any sort of time pressure or performance anxiety.