Using OpenEMR in Family Practice

We are running OpenEMR from a virtual machine in our Family Practice office now with no problem.

We have been open for about 10 days now and we have been using OpenEMR from the first day with no problems. We use a virtual machine played with the free vmware player. It is a complete linux system set up by Rod Roark with OpenEMR, Freeb, and SQL-Ledger. The vm is run under Windows XP on a Toshiba laptop with a P4 1.8ghz and 1GB of RAM. In the morning, I load the vm and the other computers in the office, on the network, can log in by clicking on the desktop link to OpenEMR. At the end of the day, I back up the vm to a DVD. Sometimes I take the laptop home to work and sometimes not. My staff has taken to it with no complaints. We have a hybrid system of keeping a limited paper chart and the EMR chart. When I can afford it, I will upgrade to a nice fast desktop machine to run the vm with a fast, high capacity DVD writer. I am now working on customizing OpenEMR a little to work better for us. To keep things simple, I make a copy of the vm to experiment with so I don’t mess up our real data or system. This is definitely the way things will be done in the future. I highly recommend that physicians who want to save themselves a lot of headaches with EMR and practice management software should look into it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *