OpenEMR

OpenEMR is an Open source medical practice management, electronic medical records, prescription writing, and medical billing application.

It is an open attempt to serve as a replacement for medical applications such as Medical Manager, and Health Pro. It features support for EDI billing to clearing houses such as Medavant and ZirMED using ANSI X12. Medical claim and accounts receivable are accomplished through SQL-Ledger, which has been customized. Calendar features include categories for appointment types, colors associated with appointment types, repeating appointments, and the ability to restrict appointments based on type. There is an advanced medical claim management interface, accounting for EOB entry, customization to work with a clearing house for automated 835 or ERA entry against outstanding medical claims, customizable medical encounter forms, support for voice recognition software, electronic or scanned digital document management for records, and support for HL7 messages.

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 June 2002.

The project, now open source, 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 as more developers and users became active in making improvements (Sunset Systems was the most prolific of these), the project's code base was moved to SourceForge in March 2005, where it remains today. The project administrators at SourceForge are Rod Roark, Andres Paglayan. The SourceForge OpenEMR home web page is maintained at oemr.org.

The OpenEMR maintained at SourceForge is one of the "LAMP" type of web based software applications that uses a web server such as Apache, MySQL as the database and PHP as its programming language. As with most "LAMP" architecture makes OpenEMR easy to port to all Linux, Unix and BSD architectures. In addition OpenEMR runs on several versions of Microsoft Windows.

The OpenEMR at SourceForge project is licensed under the General Gnu Public License, version 2 (GPLv2). The OpenEMR community at SourceForge is active and growing.

After the transfer of the OpenEMR project and OpenEMR community to SourceForge, Walt Pennington transferred his interest in the web page openemr.net and his copy of the software repository to the Possibility Forge. The Possibility Forge maintains a separate version and in the open source world is referred to as a "fork". The Possibility Forge has renamed their version to "openEMR" with a small "o".

The Possibility Forge gained source curatorship of the PennFirm version from The Pennington Firm, and renamed this version "openEMR". Development on this second project was continued through a partnership between Possibility Forge and ITD Medical: ITD Unlimited. At the end of 2007, The Possibility Forge, Inc. acquired all intellectual property from ITD Unlimited.

Through private communication from Possibility Forge the PennFirm version of the software has had its licensing changed to the Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). The LGPL allows the Possibility Forge to combine their version with closed source proprietary modules. They hope to get improved performance in this fashion.

The LGPL is frequently used in libraries and is frequently referred to the as the Library GPL. LGPL is not compatible with GPL licensing since the General GPL prohibits combining the software with non-GPL licensed software.

External links

• OpenEMR Home Page
• OpenEMR @ SourceForge.net
• OpenEMR Review at GPL Medicine
• Debian Lists Several Open Source Electronic Health Records which include OpenEMR
• OpenEMR is listed on Free Software Foundation's of free open source software.
• Synitech first announces the release of OpenEMR in Linuxmednews.
• Possibility Forge