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OpenEMR is Accepting Donations on OpenCollective

openemr.blog

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Re: OpenEMR is Accepting Donations on OpenCollective

#3

Post by exception_e »

Dowwie wrote: post #2

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?

Most of our users are outside of the US where nonfree solutions are simply not in the cards financially.

In the US, we are seeing adoption in practices that can't afford expensive EMRs and in those that want to truly customize their system.

Also, Meaningful Use/HITECH is not ACA.

Re: OpenEMR is Accepting Donations on OpenCollective

#4

Post by ethanwillis »

Dowwie wrote: post #2

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?

You mean it heavily funded the adoption of Epic. Sorry to break it to you, this was shuffling around of money to conglomerates.

Re: OpenEMR is Accepting Donations on OpenCollective

#5

Post by pg_bot »

Dowwie wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: OpenEMR is Accepting Donations on OpenCollective

#6

Post by robto »

ethanwillis wrote: post #4
Dowwie wrote: post #2

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?

You mean it heavily funded the adoption of Epic. Sorry to break it to you, this was shuffling around of money to conglomerates.

Pretty sure Epic isn't a conglomerate, though you are correct that they benefited immensely from the Meaningful Use/HITECH legislation.

Re: OpenEMR is Accepting Donations on OpenCollective

#7

Post by ch4s3 »

ethanwillis wrote: post #4
Dowwie wrote: post #2

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?

You mean it heavily funded the adoption of Epic. Sorry to break it to you, this was shuffling around of money to conglomerates.

and a few others

Re: OpenEMR is Accepting Donations on OpenCollective

#8

Post by tedjdziuba »

Dowwie wrote: post #2

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?

> Why does this project exist?

OpenEMR exists because during the summer of 2000, with the dot-com boom in full swing on the left side of the United States, four high school students in Cheshire, Connecticut spent the humid part of our year in a basement writing PHP code to manage documents for an internal medicine practice that belonged to one of the students' mothers.

It worked well enough. The four of us were all college-bound in different directions, so instead of trying to sell the software to medical practices, we released it under the GPL. Open source contributors took it from there.

Re: OpenEMR is Accepting Donations on OpenCollective

#9

Post by rch »

pg_bot wrote: post #5
Dowwie wrote: post #2

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?

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 check…

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...

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

http://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/cancer/documents/pdfs...

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