
OpenEMR is Accepting Donations on OpenCollective - exception_e
https://www.openemr.blog/post/accepting-donations-on-opencollective/
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toomuchtodo
Have you considered partnering with Watsi.org to provide EMR functionality for
their third world universal healthcare project?

[http://blog.watsi.org/watsi-coverage/](http://blog.watsi.org/watsi-coverage/)

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exception_e
Great idea!

I'm going to show this to a few of the folks on our non-profit board. From
first glance, it looks like a great fit.

Thanks, Matthew

~~~
toomuchtodo
Spectacular! Please let me know if I can be of any assistance. Not related to
Watsi, but happy to do whatever legwork is required. Passionate about
effective, efficient healthcare delivery.

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exception_e
Awesome! I have a million things on my plate with the project so if you want,
you can reach out to me at matthewvita48 (at) gmail (dot) com so we can
discuss what may interest you!

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toomuchtodo
I’ll be in touch shortly!

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exception_e
Hi everyone. Happy to see my posting caught some attention (nice start to my
lunch break!).

Obviously, our team is asking for badly needed donations to support our work
(primarily for poor locale users), but we're always looking for volunteers, as
Brady pointed out. I am a serial HN reader and have learned that folks love
React (and Vue) here. If there are any React (or Vue) gurus interested in
volunteering, we'd love to get our UI at parity with modern web standards. I
can definitely say that volunteering on this project is great for technical
reasons as well as getting to meet grateful users from all over the world.

I noticed there's some healthy discussion here around US healthcare/open
source usage and I ask you to consider that very modern and developed
countries such as the US, UK, etc, etc have the money for EMRs and a more-or-
less reasonable gov't that offers up regulations and incentives to get rid of
paper. This is simply _not_ the case in many parts of the world. Therefore, I
ask you to consider that without medical open source solutions (not just
limited to OpenEMR), most are stuck on paper!

NOTE/UPDATE: John, our data scientist on the project, posted on here about his
AWS efforts (seen below). He's never used HN and is having a hard time editing
his post. `:%s/Trial/Tier` is what he's getting at... we have put together a
very low cost (AWS free tier) solution for folks in low resource areas as well
universities looking to teach with a modern EMR without the big price tag!

-Matthew

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Dowwie
The Affordable Care Act mandated use of EMR and heavily funded its adoption.
Is there really not one fully implemented open source solution after all that
money was spent?

Why does this project exist?

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pg_bot
As someone who has made an EMR and has used OpenEMR there are a few reasons
why there hasn't been a fully implemented open source solution in this space.

1.) Hospitals are fairly risk averse organizations. Instead of spending
resources on building out a technical team and building their own solutions
they usually will outsource tech to a third party (EPIC, GE, Cerner, etc). A
CTO of a hospital is usually just a checkbook personified and buying IBM never
got anyone fired.

2.) An EMR is not a trivial software application. A good one has an extremely
large feature set with multiple specialized applications depending on the type
of physician who is using it.

3.) There are compliance and regulatory hurdles which scare away a lot of
people from working in the field.

4.) The players in the field have no incentive to open source their work since
they make all of their money on enterprise sales contracts.

~~~
rch
IBM Watson (and, separately, Epic) certainly helped get the former President
of M.D. Anderson "fired":

[https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/08/md-anderson-depinho-
resi...](https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/08/md-anderson-depinho-resigns/)

The CIO (Lynn Vogel) "departed" recently as well:

[http://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/cancer/documents/pdfs...](http://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/cancer/documents/pdfs/TCL011714.pdf)

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johnbwilliams
OpenEMR Cloud Express Free Trial (750 hours/month)
[https://tinyurl.com/yavdup7j](https://tinyurl.com/yavdup7j)

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danjoc
What sort of market share does OpenEMR have? How many customer installs are
there? 10s? 1000s?

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brady_m
Since OpenEMR is open source and supported by numerous vendors, companies, and
volunteers, it's very difficult to accurately collect this information. It's
downloaded more than 4000 times per month, and the project is confident there
are thousands of installations in the US and across the globe. There was an
attempt in 2012 in this article to quantify the number of installations:
[http://www.openhealthnews.com/hotnews/openemr-continues-
grow...](http://www.openhealthnews.com/hotnews/openemr-continues-grow-
popularity-and-use)

~~~
danjoc
In the US, wouldn't they need to do a Meaningful Use attestation?

[http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ehr-vendor-
marketshare-...](http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ehr-vendor-marketshare-
mu-attestations-vendor-chart)

It seems like a solid number for those should be available somewhere.

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brady_m
Thanks for pointing that out(I learn something new every day). I looked into
this and attestations are published here:
[https://dashboard.healthit.gov/datadashboard/documentation/e...](https://dashboard.healthit.gov/datadashboard/documentation/ehr-
products-mu-attestation-data-documentation.php)

On a quick scan (the spreadsheet file was 300MB and it looks like I wasn't
able to load everything on my computer at work), there are at least 300+ OEMR
attestations (this is the non-profit organization that represents OpenEMR for
MU certification).

Will plan to look into this further and thanks again for pointing this out.

~~~
fraidy_cat
sounds like a job for big data analytics

