According to the project leaders, the new features and modernization make this OpenEMR release a significant advance in the field.
OpenEMR is a popular open source electronic medical records (EMR), and the authors announced that version 5.0 has achieved the complete ONC certification. ONC is the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), who established standards for structured data provided by EHR software.
This ONC certification is needed for medical practices in the USA to participate in Medicare’s Quality Payment Program and to comply with MACRA. MACRA is Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015.
OpenEMR is a very complete medical practice management solution. This Complete Meaningful Use Certification was the result of a community effort along several years, involving over $220,000 in code and effort contributions.
The number of enhancements brought into OpenEMR was huge and includes standardization of patient health info, care coordination, more patient engagement and privacy, safety and automated metrics calculations, along with many clinical quality measures.
There is a long list of contributors to this effort. The author of this blog contributed with the Spanish translation.
The OpenEMR 5.0.0 release also brings many additional features unrelated to meaningful use.
A major enhancement in this release is a better user interface, pointing towards efficient workflow.
Another enhancement is a complete Ophthalmology/Optometry module, designed and built by a practicing Ophthalmologist.
The OpenEMR community remains committed to continued support and improvement of the product. The last year has been great for OpenEMR with more active development and a broadening community of developers, users, volunteers, professionals, and OpenEMR champions. As OpenEMR continues to improve and needs for OpenEMR increases. The project co-administrator is Brady Miller MD.
This release brings enhancements in the patient tracker, reporting, scheduling, billing, security, and form validation modules. Internationalization of OpenEMR was enhanced by adding support for right to left languages to the already included 33 languages. Enterprise use of OpenEMR was allowed by changing the MySQL database engine to InnoDB. Advantages for OpenEMR developers were provided by migrating the codebase from Sourceforge to Github, which allows for efficient development.
About OpenEMR
OpenEMR was originally released as an open source project 18 years ago and is maintained and supported by a dynamic community of professionals. OpenEMR is the most popular open source EHR (electronic health records) and medical practice management solution. OpenEMR is downloaded more than 6,000 times monthly and it has been estimated
that OpenEMR serves more than 110,000 medical providers and up to 210 million patients across the globe. For more information, visit: http://www.openemr.com.ar
About OEMR
OEMR is a non for profit organization, founded ten years ago to support the global project with a mission to ensure that all people have access to high-quality medical care through the donation of free, open source medical software and service relating to that software. The OEMR organization is a legal entity that maintains ONC certification for OpenEMR. For more information, visit: http://www.oemr.org.