Some interesting new beginnings? (OpenEMR Project)

open forum
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All,

As I hinted in my Tweet: https://twitter.com/MatthewVita/status/983163925070921728, our core team at OpenEMR and the board of our existing organization*** have begun to set forth on a bold mission to create an even stronger presence of OpenEMR in the global setting (with emphasis on inpatient care).

Please read the attached mission and legal description in the Tweet and do let me know if you think your open source healthcare project would be interested in working with us! This is all for a great cause and, in the spirit of open-source, I invite you to collaborate to make it that much better. We can use exclusively openhealthhub to work together and leverage @pacharanero’s unique insights and leadership.

(Please reply here or email me at matthewvita48 (at) gmail (dot) com if any of this interests you - this is all just getting started so now is a great time to step up if you want to be an early staff member or even board member!)

-Matthew Vita
OpenEMR Project Administrator








***Full transparency: previous bad actors (and, unfortunately, leaders) failed to submit IRS paperwork too many times and we cannot afford to continue the legal fight to correct those mistakes. Our board (who is great and experienced) has to start over anyway, so we’re doing it with a totally new optimistic perspective since we’ve learned that the IRS is “okay” with open source foundations again. :slight_smile:

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(Just got an email from a fellow project here - I will report back!)

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… Thoughts? :slight_smile:

cc: @pacharanero

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This all sounds excellent and hints at a really bright future for openEMR. I note the foundation will not be operating outside the USA, otherwise I might have been interested in learning more about openEMR and whether any of it has applicability in the UK or further afield.

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Hi @pacharanero!

This is actually just the way we’re forming the organization here in the states. Basically, this means we are establishing the organization legally in the state of Delaware and it doesn’t disqualify us from doing global healthcare IT work or receiving donations/grants from orgs in different US states or countries.

If we do partner with an organization outside of the states, I plan on filing for what is called a “Foreign Qualification” per location. This would be a big milestone, of course :).

I hope all of this makes sense - do let me know if not.

I hope the UK folks here do consider our mission. We just started to talk to some US universities (mainly to the nice folks at various Nursing Informatics uni programs) and it seems like we’re starting really strong / found a niche.

PS: We need some more resources of course… please email me or post here in the open if you are interested in helping out! We are doing some exciting things, all in the name of open source healthcare IT!

-Matthew

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(hope that all made sense - ask if not :slight_smile: )

-m

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Anyone? :slight_smile:

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Hi @MatthewVita I think you might need to make your call to action a little more specific.

People in the Open Health Tech space are often over-run with things they could get involved in, so the challenge is deciding which projects will give the best yield of output for effort. My personal resources are limited due to other work, so I can’t really get more involved at present.

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@pacharanero Great feedback. Thanks!

The call to action is for any interested person here to consider making use of OpenHealthHub (and Github, of course) to collaborate with the OpenEMR project. This translates to the following big picture considerations:

1 - Interoperability & Utility

Allowing for existing projects here to interoperate** so that we can create an even better open source healthcare ecosystem (this is related to @vin’s interesting name idea for a new project here).

To get a sense of our group’s thinking, we are starting a non-profit for OpenEMR (it’s a foundation) with the following mission:

“improving patient outcomes by providing clinicians everywhere a high-quality, open source medical care system.”

…and this definitely doesn’t stop at just the EMR. We have been working with other open source projects that connect to the system for a long time (for example, we recently partnered with Yves of DWV to provide a native DICOM solution).

From an engineering perspective, integrations should (in theory) be easier now that we have basic FHIR support, are multi-platform (Nix/Windows/Docker), and have gone Cloud Native with AWS (GCP and Azure options are being worked on.)

2 - Impact

Considering working with our vibrant community on one (or many!) of the following core roadmap projects:

  • Affordable Medical Devices Connectivity: Affordable and high ­quality hardware to provide low resource users data-­centric medical devices.

  • Units Support: Support for hospitalized patient management.

  • Team Tasks Management:­ Real-time, team­-centric care module.

  • Advanced Billing: ­ Continued improvements of the institutional billing features.

  • Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Integration: JSON­ based healthcare schema that is the future of healthcare data modeling (we have basic support at this time - I honestly believe we can do a lot of good in the world if we get full coverage of FHIR here).

  • Modern Cloud Solutions: Ongoing support and development of OpenEMR Cloud.

  • Quality Reporting: Ability to export more actionable and comprehensive medical reports.

  • Realistic Test Data Generation: ­ Life­-like fake seed data for demos, academic use cases, and QA.

  • Clinical Intelligence Dashboards: ­ Big data analytics platform for better understanding a patient population and trends.

  • Intelligent Chart Summarization: ­ User-friendly clinical natural language processing to transform plain text into structured medical data.

  • Normalized Code Directory Structure:­ Legacy code organization overhaul.

  • Separation of Business Logic Code: Legacy code refactor overhaul.

  • Module Framework: Legacy architecture overhaul.

  • Frontend User Interface Rework: ­ Modern UI frameworks and best practices to improve user experiences.

  • Telemedicine Support: ­ Patient video encounters support.

  • Speech Dictation Documentation: ­ Easy to use documentation to configure speech dictation support.

  • Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS): ­ Game changing radiology integration and viewing technology.

  • Medical Administration Record: ­ Electronic module to improve patient system and streamline clinical documentation processes.

  • Remote Patient Vitals Module: ­ Low resource solution to remotely monitor patient vitals via SMS on an interval basis.

Please reply here or email me at matthewvita48 (at) gmail (dot) com if any of this interests you - our group is mainly made of volunteer designers, programmers, clinicians, etc (we take everyone!).

Also, if the foundation interests you, let me know and I can list out open work items/strategic positions*** at this early time!

Thanks!
Matthew

** This won’t make sense for all projects, of course. However, it’s always good to have feedback from external parties thanks to the forum here.

*** Everyone is a volunteer (for now, at least). We have significantly ramped up our fundraising strategy for general project operating costs.