OpenEMR
Encyclopedia
OpenEMR is a Free and Open Source
, Practice management
and Electronic Medical Records software application. It is ONC Complete Ambulatory EHR certified and it features fully integrated electronic medical records, practice management
, scheduling, electronic billing, internationalization, free support, a vibrant community, and a whole lot more. It can run on Microsoft
systems, Unix-like
systems (Linux
, UNIX
, and BSD systems), Mac OS X
and other platforms.
The project evolved through version 2.0 and the Pennington Firm (Pennfirm) took over as its primary maintainer in January 2004.
Pennfirm made the medical community more aware of OpenEMR, and attracted a number of independent developers who became increasingly active in making improvements. Walt Pennington transferred the OpenEMR software repository to SourceForge
in March 2005, where it remains today. Mr. Pennington also established Rod Roark, Andres Paglayan and James Perry, Jr. as administrators of the project. Andres Paglayan and James Perry eventually took other directions and were replaced by Brady Miller in August of 2009. So at this time Rod Roark and Brady Miller are the project's co-administrators.
Following are some of the guiding principles that have been formulated by the project's most active members:
The OpenEMR community is thriving and enjoying some of the broadest user support and developer support. OpenEMR is one of the most popular free electronic medical records in use today with over 3,700 downloads per month. The development group has professional developers, security specialists, and physicians involved in the development process. The community maintains the official OpenEMR web site at open-emr.org.
" type of web based software application that uses a web server such as Apache
, MySQL
as the database and PHP
as its programming language. As with most "LAMP" architecture, OpenEMR can run on Linux
, Unix
, BSD, Mac OS X
, and Microsoft
architectures.
Free and open source software
Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...
, Practice management
Practice management
Practice management software is a category of software that deals with the day-to-day operations of a medical practice. Such software frequently allows users to capture patient demographics, schedule appointments, maintain lists of insurance payers, perform billing tasks, and generate reports.In...
and Electronic Medical Records software application. It is ONC Complete Ambulatory EHR certified and it features fully integrated electronic medical records, practice management
Practice management
Practice management software is a category of software that deals with the day-to-day operations of a medical practice. Such software frequently allows users to capture patient demographics, schedule appointments, maintain lists of insurance payers, perform billing tasks, and generate reports.In...
, scheduling, electronic billing, internationalization, free support, a vibrant community, and a whole lot more. It can run on Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
systems, Unix-like
Unix-like
A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....
systems (Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
, and BSD systems), Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
and other platforms.
Features
Patient Demographics
- Track patient demographics
- Primary information (name, date of birth, sex, identification)
- Marital status
- Contact information of patient and patient's employer
- Primary provider
- HIPAA information
- Language and ethnicity
- Insurance coverage
- Deceased Tracking
- Fully Customizable
Patient Scheduling
- Supports multiple facilities
- Patient appointment notification via email and sms
- Compact and flexible appointment calendar
- Calendar features include:
- Find open appointment slots
- Categories for appointment types
- Colors associated with appointment types and facility
- Repeating appointments
- Restricting appointments based on type
Electronic Medical Records
- Encounters
- Medical Issues
- Medications
- Immunizations
- Forms and clinical notes:
- Vitals (growth charts included)
- SOAP noteSOAP noteThe SOAP note is a method of documentation employed by health care providers to write out notes in a patient's chart, along with other common formats, such as the admission note...
- Review of systemsReview of systemsA review of systems is a technique used by health-care providers for eliciting a history from a patient. It is often structured as a component of an admission note covering the organ systems, with a focus upon the subjective symptoms perceived by the patient...
- Template Driven Forms
- CAMOS (Computer Aided Medical Ordering System)
- Nation Notes (WYSIWYG editor)
- Ability to create and customize forms
- Graphical Charting
- Labs
- Procedures
- Patient Reports
- Referrals
- Patient Notes
- Disclosures
- Electronic digital document management
- Voice recognition ready (MS Windows Operating Systems)
- Paper chart tracking
- Electronic Syndrome Surveillance reporting
Prescriptions
- Online drug search
- Track patient prescriptions and medications
- Create and send prescriptions
- E-Prescribe
- Fax
- In-house pharmacy dispensary support
Medical Billing
- Flexible system of coding including CPTCurrent Procedural TerminologyThe Current Procedural Terminology code set is maintained by the American Medical Association through the CPT Editorial Panel. The CPT code set describes medical, surgical, and diagnostic services and is designed to communicate uniform information about medical services and procedures among...
, HCPCS and ICDICDThe International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems is a medical classification that provides codes to classify diseases and a wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or disease...
codes and the ability to add others - Support for electronic billing to clearing houses such as Medavant/Capario and ZirMED using ANSI X12ANSI ASC X12The Accredited Standards Committee X12 , chartered by the American National Standards Institute more than 30 years ago, develops and maintains EDI and CICA standards along with XML schemas which drive business processes globally...
- Support for paper claims
- Medical claim management interface
- Insurance Eligibility Queries
- Insurance Tracking Interface
- Accounts Receivable Interface
- EOB Entry Interface
- Customizable to work with a clearing house for automated 835 or ERA entry
Clinical Decision Rules
- Physician Reminders
- Patient Reminders
- Clinical Quality Measure Calculations
- Automated Meaningful Use Measurement Calculations
- Fully Customizable and Flexible
Multilanguage Support
- Supports use of multiple languages within the same clinic
- Currently Supported Languages:
- English (American)American EnglishAmerican English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
- English (Indian)Indian EnglishIndian English is an umbrella term used to describe dialects of the English language spoken primarily in the Republic of India.As a result of British colonial rule until Indian independence in 1947 English is an official language of India and is widely used in both spoken and literary contexts...
- DanishDanish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
- DutchDutch languageDutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
- FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
- GreekGreek languageGreek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
- Portuguese (Brazilian)Brazilian PortugueseBrazilian Portuguese is a group of Portuguese dialects written and spoken by most of the 190 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a few million Brazilian emigrants, mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Canada, Japan and Paraguay....
- Portuguese (European)European PortugueseEuropean Portuguese refers to the variety of Portuguese spoken in continental Portugal, as well as the Azores and Madeira islands...
- SpanishSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
- SwedishSwedish languageSwedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
- TurkishTurkish languageTurkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
- English (American)
- Any language can be added and translated in a collaborative Google Docs spreadsheet maintained by the OpenEMR community
- Fully supports UTF-8UTF-8UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
encoding
Security
- Ability to Encrypt Patient Documents
- Supports fine-grained per-user access controls
- Remotely accessible from any modern web browser with a suitable security certificate installed
History
OpenEMR was originally developed by Synitech and version 1.0 was released in June 2001 as MP Pro (MedicalPractice Professional). Much of the code was then reworked for HIPAA compliance and improved security, and the product was reintroduced as OpenEMR version 1.3 a year later, in July 2002. It became an open source project and was registered on SourceForge.net on August 13, 2002.The project evolved through version 2.0 and the Pennington Firm (Pennfirm) took over as its primary maintainer in January 2004.
Pennfirm made the medical community more aware of OpenEMR, and attracted a number of independent developers who became increasingly active in making improvements. Walt Pennington transferred the OpenEMR software repository to SourceForge
SourceForge
SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
in March 2005, where it remains today. Mr. Pennington also established Rod Roark, Andres Paglayan and James Perry, Jr. as administrators of the project. Andres Paglayan and James Perry eventually took other directions and were replaced by Brady Miller in August of 2009. So at this time Rod Roark and Brady Miller are the project's co-administrators.
Community
The OpenEMR community is dedicated to guarding OpenEMR's status as a free, open source software solution for medical practices. Its members are composed of software developers, as well as physicians and others with extensive medical and billing knowledge, all with the common goal of making OpenEMR a superior alternative to its proprietary counterparts.Following are some of the guiding principles that have been formulated by the project's most active members:
- OpenEMR will remain 100% free software under the GNU GPL.
- Maintain a spirit of openness, kindness and cooperation.
- Give back to the free software community.
- Document our changes and improvements.
- Do not hide problems.
- Do not discriminate against persons or groups, subject to our focus on the field of medicine and we encourage the use of OpenEMR in other languages.
- Avoid needless complexity, to include software design, installation, maintenance and usability.
The OpenEMR community is thriving and enjoying some of the broadest user support and developer support. OpenEMR is one of the most popular free electronic medical records in use today with over 3,700 downloads per month. The development group has professional developers, security specialists, and physicians involved in the development process. The community maintains the official OpenEMR web site at open-emr.org.
Deployments
Because this is an open source project that does not register its users, it is very difficult to estimate the number of practitioners that are using this software. A survey of commercial supporters of this software in the US show at least 100 clinical facilities (with an average of 5 practitioners per facility) are using this software with commercial help. There are also articles describing single clinician deployments and a free clinic deployment. Internationally, it is known that there are practitioners in Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Australia, Sweden, Holland, Israel, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Indonesia, Bermuda, Armenia, Kenya, and Greece that are either testing or actively using OpenEMR for use as a free electronic medical records program.Architecture
OpenEMR is a "LAMPLAMP (software bundle)
LAMP is an acronym for a solution stack of free, open source software, referring to the first letters of Linux , Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP , principal components to build a viable general purpose web server.The GNU project is advocating people to use the term "GLAMP" since what is known as...
" type of web based software application that uses a web server such as Apache
Apache HTTP Server
The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache , is web server software notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. In 2009 it became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone...
, MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
as the database and PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
as its programming language. As with most "LAMP" architecture, OpenEMR can run on Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
, BSD, Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
, and Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
architectures.