An Indonesean Hacker named Dedi Dwianto has just publicized a Vulnerability in OpenEMR. This is a significant milestone for the project. This means that OpenEMR is popular enough for a security researcher to take notice. Open Source has the potential to be more secure, but only if security researchers look for flaws and then the projects respond by fixing the code. (I wish I had hackers studying my code…) I am sure that the OpenEMR folks will be releasing a patch soon. If you are an OpenEMR user, you should upgrade to the soon-to-be-released version ASAP. Read more for a description of the vulnerability…

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Womens Health Services of Santa Fe, New Mexico was recently awarded $70,000 in additional funding from the City of Santa Fe for their work providing health services to individuals in the the City of Santa Fe. Currently Women’s Health Services provides 7,000-10,000 clinic visits a year to this population. Women’s Health Services was selected by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Office on Women’s Health to develop a National Community Center of Excellence in Women’s Health (Santa Fe CCOE) in 2001. Women’s Health Services have selected OpenEMR to handle their electronic health record needs.

A portion of the funding went to hardware to be used for electronical medical records. The Women’s Health Services has been running OpenEMR in a trial project with three physicians. Women’s Health Services is now ready to use OpenEMR in the main the clinic.

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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.

Want to learn all about OpenEMR in an hour? I have just finished a presentation of 145 screenshots including narrative text, divided into eleven sections. You can find it at http://www.sunsetsystems.com/node/8.
Other OpenEMR resources including a demo site are at http://www.oemr.org/.

A continuing challenge for Free Software is that everyone wants it to be… free. However there is always a cost for initial development, in terms of someone’s time or money.

As a consultant and OpenEMR developer I have several clients who have generously sponsored important OpenEMR improvements. But I’ve also found that some desirable features remain unaddressed because no one is willing to fund the entire cost of development.

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* Putting EHR standards to work – implementing the e-health society
* ICMCC Conference on EHR Standardization and Interoperability
* The Hague. NL
* February 6-7, 2006
* www.icmccstandards.org

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* Putting EHR standards to work – implementing the e-health society
* ICMCC Conference on EHR Standardization and Interoperability
* The Hague. NL
* February 6-7, 2006
* www.icmccstandards.org
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Today OpenEMR version 2.8.0 is released for download at the project’s SourceForge site. Concurrently, a companion FreeB release 0.11 is available.

Improvements since the previous stable OpenEMR release (2.7.2) are:

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OpenEMR uses FreeB for electronic billing and SQL-Ledger for practice accounting. Recently Rod Roark of Sunset Systems has added UB-92 support to OpenEMR.

OpenEMR is a full featured electronic health record using the classic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) architecture. OpenEMR performs well as an electronic health record across multiple platforms including Microdoft Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, Windows Windows XP, multiple distributions of Linux, and some installations of FreeBSD – OpenBSD.

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For those who are considering the Free and Open Source OpenEMR solution, we have just completed an open source project with Advent
Consulting. The Advent team has provided insurance companies, HMOs, doctors and hospitals with implementations of sophisticated open source electronic medical record (EMR) system solutions. They also provided custom integration and support for voice over IP (using Asterisk) and SQL-ledger a FOSS accounting backend system. This provided us with a very efficient solution.

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.