OpenEMR presentation at the upcoming Geneva 2012 'Libre Software' Conference

Sam Bowen | Libre Software Meeting Newsletter | June 1, 2012

The following is an abstract of the presentation to be given by Dr. Sam Bowen at the Geneva 2012 'Libre Software' Conference on July 11, 2012.

OpenEMR is a state-of-the-art electronic health record that has been fully translated into English (American, Indian), Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, Portuguese (Brazilian, European), Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. The system has been certified for “Meaningful Use” in the United States, has been adopted for international use by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and by the Peace Corp.

These “Meaningful Use” criteria include 25 core features that are generally useful for care givers that have appropriate access to the requisite technology. These features are listed in the enclosed table(s). OpenEMR is a web enabled system with integrated scheduling and electronic billing, The MySQL database allows for integration with other open source tools. IPPF has used this architecture to their advantage to integrate Pentaho for business intelligence reporting and to develop a "data warehouse" that can receive monthly de-identified data from OpenEMR in XML format for aggregation and reporting at a national level. OpenEMR is extremely flexible with a wide variety of ways to add medical record formats that meet the varied needs of different cultures as well as specialties. Many of the format changes can be done easily without any programming skills. The open source community is very large and flourishing. OpenEMR has been downloaded in excess of 150,000 copies in 174 countries.

Open Health News' Take: 

OpenEMR is one of the top open source electronic health record (EHR) solutions available today. Some of the particular strenghts of OpenEMR is that it has a billing module and there are more that 60 commercial solution providers with the staff and expertise to implement and support it. In addition, as noted by Sam Bowen and detailed in this article, OpenEMR has been certified under the meaningful use criteria.

Some of the other noteworthy open source EHR systems include OpenMRS, VistA, RPMS, Tolven, OpenEHR, and OSCAR. Check out these and other open souce health IT solutions in the Resources Section of Open Health News. More information on the 13th Libre Software Conference taking place in Geneva, Switzerland  here-- Peter Groen, Senior Editor, Open Health News (OHNews)