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 of 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 took over as its primary maintainer in January of 2004.

Pennfirm did a good job of making 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 of 2005, where it remains today.