OpenEMR users contributed new tools for the installation of OpenEMR, Apache, PHP and MySQL on Mac OSX. The new Mac OSX tools can be found in the Downloads section of OpenEMR A new Mac OSX forum helps Mac OSX users discuss issues specific to running OpenEMR on a Mac OSX server.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association (NLMA) has announced its intention to develop its provincial electronic medical record (EMR) using open source software (OSS). NeLL, as the EMR project is known, will network all the province’s 1,000 physicians. In its first phase, NeLL will include electronic prescribing, billing, and charting. NeLL will run on a Linux desktop, which will be the default and only supported operating system on PCs shipped with NeLL.

The project will take an existing OS EMR and expand the functionality, contributing the results of the work back to the open source community.

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A service provider/integrator firm in the US is now implementing Care2x in hospice and palliative care sector. It is hiring paid programmers for customization jobs. Please contact and send your resume to matthew@patientcarerx.com.

For those PHP lovers among the open source hackers for the medical world: a PHP version of the Perl HL7 toolkit‘s API has been created within the Care2x project. The API has been announced on the PEAR site, and the call for votes has been initiated, so as to accept this package in the official PHP PEAR list. It would be rather nice if those PHP lovers would audit the package, and vote. For details, see
the PEAR proposal.

Hello, does anyone know of a document image capturing application? Something that can scan in a medical chart and store it or even attach/index it to a EMR, which then could be later viewed by a physician via the web? I know there are proprietary solutions like KoFax etc. Thank you.

GoEMR.com announces that it will be offering support services for OpenEMR as well as OSCAR. Support services include installation, customization, server/data maintenance, as well as custom programming.

The programmers at GoEMR.com are working on converting the OSCAR USA SOAPwizard component from jsp to php in order to give OpenEMR a much stronger progress note templating capability. The conversion to php will also make the SOAPwizard able to be integrated with other php projects such as FreeMed. Troy Jordan, managing partner of HealthWare, LLC and owner of GoEMR.com, said he chooses to contibute to OpenEMR because he was impressed with its intuitiveness and its integration of FreeB, an open source billing module.

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CanadianEMR’s Blog has an posting debating the relative merits of Open Source vs. Closed EMR’s. The author of the blog posting is a bit pessimistic speaking about it as being in the future. I wonder if he knows about the Canadian born OSCAR project available right now with service contracts? ‘The ‘open source’ EMR debate is one that has raged on for years. The concept is quite straightforward, open the code for a particular EMR system. Allow end users to modify and adapt the program so that enhancements can be progressively built into the EMR system. Share the experience of the end-users with others in the open source environment. Progressively the software will improve and will achieve greater functionality. More important, through the participation of 1000’s (hopefully) of users, there is reduced likelihood that the software would become outdated and that the vendor may fail. At least that is the theory…’

Here’s about as good a summary as you can get of currently active Free and Open Source Software EHR/EMR projects courtesy of Dan Johnson, MD. Dr. Johnson is the author of the earliest known writings on Free and Open Source Software in medicine. He continues his activity in this area.

June 11, 2004,

Dear Dr. Rollow, Mr. Weir, and Mr Moy:

Thank you for speaking to me this week about DOQ-IT and open source
software.

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Developers now have direct access to the OpenEMR Subversion development files. This access is available using Subversion. Subversion is an advanced and flexible replacement for CVS. Subversion is an open source application, and is available at http://subversion.tigris.org. Only recent versions of OpenEMR repositories are available at http://openemr.net/svn/openemr. You can check out a working copy of OpenEMR if you have the subversion tools installed by issuing:

svn co http://openemr.net/svn/openemr.

In addition to the increased access, OpenEMR also has a nightly .tar snapshot.

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Thre is much complicated business logic in a medical organization. The insurance system is difficult for system development. This seems like a tremendous barrier to software development. But this type of barrier exsists not only in medicine but also in other areas. What do you think are the real barriers to developing medical software?