I have been testing openemr 4.1.2 with patch 4 for the past few months. Despite being able to install and reinstall after crashes and upgrading of OS (Ubuntu 13.10 & Fedora 20) I am still not confident for it to be ready for full production and deployment (and teaching) my support staff to use this as the sole medical record of the practice.
My wishlist is a lite version which is simple to install and deploy for a small single or 2 person primary care practice with billing by self-payment and insurance and with SOAP with a dropdown screen for easy inputing of data and with the usual but truncated demography. A virtual appliance with vmplayer or virtualbox will be a bonus. A nightly self backup to a removable external disk would give much needed confidence!
First choice should be: (For me as General Physician working in Curacao , closely related with medical healthcare of the Netherlands)
Choose between CAMOS, with more predefined text or SOAP with free form input.
Make a choice of other relevant forms. I like Pain and one of the general intake forms with some history included.
Fee sheet complicated or easy… (but probably fsgl can help with this choice to be made since I do not work in the USA.
Feel free to keep on asking for advise and I will try to find some kind of answer. If you made your choice, let me know and please explain how you will start teaching sessions so I can start the same in my office for the other professionals in our office.
When a physician is not a coder, it’s easier to subtract; therefore achieving lighter is a far simpler task.
The sizable collection of Wiki articles and video tutorials can be deployed for physician and staff education.
If none of the Contributed Forms, nor CAMOS, nor the SOAP note, as is, fit the bill; then it is not that difficult to build your own form. Bear in mind that there are two Review of Systems forms, one with radio buttons and one with check boxes.
Billing is fairly straightforward. We have had no problems over the past one and one half years (one person practice). What are your specific questions or concerns?
Portions of Demographics can be designated as unused, thereby simplifying the display.
We employ 3 methods of backup each day, which requires about 20 minutes in toto. Because backup is so important, running the backup manually gives me greater confidence than to hope that the automated process is faithfully executed each time.
Your post covers rather extensive topics. It would be more efficient to discuss one topic and resolve the concerns related to it before broaching the next topic.
I agree total with you but a watered down version will be really helpful to new users … many GPs are! What is needed at least in Malaysia is one that works right out of the box, is simple and intuitive , usability friendly and follows the usual workflow of the practice. Maybe a fork as in so many linux distros (spins) … tailored to different enviroment or country?
As far as installation issues are concerned, one cannot beat convenience of virtual appliance specially during testing and production deployment - apart from a stable LAMP configuration most useful feature is ability to take a snapshot, try changes / data conversions etc and if something does go wrong, revert to a specific previous state in a minute or so. You just have to remember to consolidate snapshots after going live for several days.
Customization is achieved by the physician after he has become familiar with the Wiki or with professional support. Either time or money has to be expended.
OpenEMR is already open source, therefore the user must provide the sweat equity or pay someone else to do the work.
The charm of OpenEMR is the openness to make choices. If you can tell us what choices you made for your practice as general practitioner in Malysia and tell us why you did make these choices, we can make a WIKI Page for installations in Malysia… for GP.
You keep us updated in this Forum and we will make the WIKI, or you can make the WIKI…, it is a rather straight forward procedure, if this Forum thread can be used as a copy paste effort.
There are as many suggestions as there are medical specialties, countries, languages, healthcare systems, etc…, but making a different OpenEMR version for all these small differences is much more complicated than just include or exclude the parts of OpenEMR for the individual.