The latest development effort of Pennington Firm, LLC for OpenEMR is a new open source medical billing component able to produce and edit HCFA 1500 forms. The latest development is an object oriented application developed using Java. The new billing feature includes several enhancements over the existing HCFA entry and printing capabilities. The new software includes both the tools to create the forms, and a web interface to edit and override the system generated information. Edits to the HCFA information can be accomplished in either the HCFA Proof screen or by editing the information at its source in OpenEMR. For more information on open source HCFA and EDI billing, please see the OpenEMR web site.

OpenEMR will be presented at the Third Annual Southern California Linux Exposition by Walt Pennington.

When: Sunday, February 13, 2005 from 1:30-2:30 pm

Where: Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, California 90015

Who: Walt Pennington of Pennington Firm, LLC

Other speakers at the Third Annual Southern California Linux Exposition include:

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The OpenEMR community received a
25 page User Documentation Manual for OpenEMR. The OpenEMR community thanks Dr. Bowen for his gracious contribution of a 25 page user manual for OpenEMR version 2.6. The user manual covers:

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Two medical billing companies and a consulting company specializing in WebMD’s Medical Manager software choose OpenEMR. Two medical billing companies and a consulting company specializing in WebMD’s Medical Manager software choose OpenEMR, a free, open source practice management, EMR and billing application to offer their medical clinic clients. Pennington Firm, LLC, a San Diego, California based open source software development company, has been selected to assist these three companies with their OpenEMR implementation and customization projects.

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The Pennington Firm edition of OpenEMR’s development tree is now available with daily updates. We have created the daily version updates as a result of requests by several clinics customizing OpenEMR for their clinic’s use. As part of creating public development access, we have removed the majority of CPT codes, which we use for testing with OpenEMR. Read More for the complete announcement.

The copyright to all CPT codes is owned by the AMA. Even though OpenEMR is a GPL, open source application, we are prevented from including CPT codes as a result of the copyright ownership by the AMA. For development purposes and to respect the AMA’s copyright we have removed all but 12 CPT codes in the development version of OpenEMR. The stable download version of OpenEMR does not contain any CPT codes.

Pennington Firm uses Subversion for its development versioning control. Subversion is similar to CVS, but includes a few features absent from CVS.

OpenEMR is the first open source electronic medical record and practice managment application to be accepted as an IBM Global Solution. As an IBM solution OpenEMR and Pennington Firm are included in IBM’s Global Solutions and Global Partner Directories. IBM’s Global Solutions Directory is an online directory containing thousands of applications, tools and services from IBM and IBM Business Partners.

OpenEMR 2.5.2 is available for download and installation at OpenEMR.net.  2.5.2 includes support for HL7, which includes the ability to parse HL7 code. Several other bug fixes or feature enhancements include:

Walt Pennington has numerous announcements about “OpenEMR”:http://pennfirm.org/services.html. *Earlier this week we released OpenEMR v. 2.5 which now contains prescribing of medications…’* and much more. Read more for the full text of the announcement.

Earlier this week we released OpenEMR v. 2.5 which now contains
prescribing of medications.

We also created several flash videos to demonstrate OpenEMR features
which can be found at OpenEMR.net.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with OpenEMR, it is an open source
practice management and electronic medical record application. We are
creating OpenEMR to compete with and be a replacement for Health Pro,
MegaWest and Medical Manager. We are now in the process of finalizing
billing using FreeB and anticipate having those features implemented and
tested by the end of April 2004.

CURRENT OpenEMR FEATURES
1. Find first available appointment by provider;
2. Support available from Pennington Firm, Synitech or other companies;
3. Extensive patient demographic information;
4. Different calendar views for medical providers and office staff;
5. Reporting using phpMyAdmin;
6. Database manipulation using phpMyAdmin;
7. Several community supported mailing lists and forums;
8. Electronic medical records;
9. Ability to bill ICD and CPT codes at the end of an encounter (CPT
codes must be separately licensed from the AMA and a .tar with CPTs are
available from Pennington Firm);
10. Medication search;
11. Add prescribed medicines to patient history;
12. Send prescriptions to in-house pharmacy;
13. Send prescriptions by email or fax to other pharmacies; and
14. Print prescriptions.

APRIL OPENEMR RELEASE
In late April OpenEMR will have additional functionality for billing
using FreeB.
1. Approved by Medi-Cal (California Medicaid) for submitting claims;
2. Ability to submit ANSI X12 or HCFA forms;
3. Clearinghouse with explicit support for OpenEMR and FreeB;
4. Separate billing interface to allow changes to be made in the event
of billing errors; and
5. Ability to print HCFA forms for billing.

As an open source application, OpenEMR can be downloaded and used. At
OpenEMR.net we are regularly adding new content for documentation,
screen shots and video illustrations.

For those clinics or billing companies that need assistance with
installing and supporting OpenEMR, we offer several support packages to
install and customize OpenEMR for the clinic, and also provide training,
including on-site installation and training.

We want to thank those that assisted with the migration of the
openhealth list which now allows us to post information concerning our
project.

Sincerely,
Walt Pennington
Pennington Firm
402 West Broadway
4th Floor
San Diego, CA 92101-3554
619-696-5050
888-480-5050
PennFirm.com

OpenEMR will have new functionality for prescriptions, pharmacies and billing. This is a pre-release notice of upcoming prescription functionality in OpenEMR. As part of our work on billing using FreeB with OpenEMR, we have added functionality for prescriptions.

Our work on prescriptions allows providers to:
1. Prescribe a new medication;

2. View patients’ existing prescription;

3. Send the prescription to the in-house pharmacy;

4. Send a prescription by email, fax or print to the patient’s pharmacy;

5. Lookup drugs in the Internet database; and

6. Special login for pharmacists to view prescriptions pending for fulfillment.

UPCOMING BILLING SUPPORT

We have successfully submitted bills to Medi-Cal, and have tied all FreeB fields to OpenEMR. We are creating a separate billing interface to allow changes for bills when there is a formatting or entry error. Our anticipated release date for OpenEMR with billing using FreeB is late April 2004.

CLINICS

Clinics using OpenEMR’s billing features will be able to send bills to Medi-Cal, a clearninghouse, or to print HCFA forms. With additional customization, OpenEMR can submit bills to any payer.

BILLING COMPANIES

Billing companies will be able to use OpenEMR with FreeB to offer practice management and EMR services to their clients, and to use FreeB to replace some of their existing billing applications.

For news and announcements on OpenEMR, please subscribe to the OpenEMR announcements mailing list.

OpenEMR is a modular, HIPAA compliant, Open Source, cross-platform Electronic Medical Records system (EMRS) developed by Synitech Incorporated. OpenEMR runs under Apache or IIS, PHP and MySQL, and includes advanced authorization and auditing functionality, automatic timeouts, group-based user configuration, extensive logging, and supports patient-requested file changes. It facilitates efficient office management through automated patient record journaling, and has been successfully integrated with third-party technologies including speech recognition, secure wireless access, tablet PCs, and biometric authentication. Interface screens are themable and optimized for consistency, simplicity, speed of access to patient information, and minimum eye strain.