OpenEMR

RATING:

4.0

(25)

About OpenEMR

OpenEMR is a cloud-based solution providing electronic medical records (EMR), medical billing and patient scheduling. The EMR functionality offers customizable forms, patient reports based on demographics, notetaking capabilities and digital document management. Voice recognition capability is available for practices using a Windows operating system. OpenEMR's billing capabilities support both electronic medical billing and traditional paper claims and offer a claim management interface. The software's scheduling system helps users find available appointment times, sort appointments into different categories, track repeating appointments and manage appointment restrictions based on their type. All calendar functions are also available on OpenEMR's m...

OpenEMR Pricing

Please contact OpenEMR Foundation directly for pricing details.

Free trial: 

Not Available

Free version: 

Available

OpenEMR Reviews

Overall Rating

4.0

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

3.5

Customer Support

3.5

Value for money

4.5

Functionality

3.5

Most Helpful Reviews for OpenEMR

1 - 5 of 25 Reviews

David

Medical Practice, 2-10 employees

Used weekly for more than 2 years

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed June 2017

Excellent product. Should have done this years ago.

I like to be self-sufficient. I have used OpenEMR for over two years and find that it suits my needs perfectly. That having been said, I am a specialist and have had to develop many of my own forms and other customizations before the product was directly useful to me. I have tended to view that more as a hobby than an impediment but for those who are not so inclined it appears that there are vendors about who would be happy to do this work for you, presumably for a price. Alternatively, the help forums are active and helpful, although one must know how to define and ask the question before the answer will be of benefit.

PROS

The price is wonderful! The product works, although not necessarily right out of the box if you have special needs. Flexibility is great. Freedom from support costs is gratifying (although it does require one to become proficient to the desired level if you wish to avoid all support costs). Fancy equipment not required. Works on multiple platforms.

CONS

There is a learning curve, especially if customizations are in order. My suspicion is that this would be relatively quick for primary care practices. Specialists might require additional customization that will either need to be done in-house or contracted out. This is not as much a con as simply a fact. I'd much rather have an open source product that I can customize myself than a proprietary one-size-fits-all product for which I can't access the code and have to keep running back to the mother company every time I want to make a minor (or major) change.

User Profile

Ralf

Verified reviewer

Medical Practice, 2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review Source: Capterra

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

4

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed December 2018

A very powerful system but some assembly is required

We are a relatively new solo Internal Medicine practice with less than 1000 active charts. We replaced NextGen's Office EMR system with this EMR. The migration from the old commercial system was painful, labor-intensive, and time-consuming because we did not have direct read access to the NextGen Office database (proprietary commercial database, which ironically was also on AWS just like our new system but we did not have system administrator or backup access). Everything had to be converted to PDF's. We chose the AWS Hosted Standard version, and we were immediately surprised how much faster and more reliable the hosted OpenEMR system was than our previous commercial system or other cumbersome and extremely unreliable and slow systems we have been forced to use at other clinics and hospitals. Staff required minimal training to use the system and historical records and patient documents can be very quickly uploaded to this system up to about 10 MB in size without changing any of the default configuration on the AWS system (there is probably a timeout setting). We use another database from larger attachments archival. The developers and super-users of this system provide expert support to upgrade issues and critical problems. With minor issues, you are more or less on your own if you want an immediate fix (hire a consultant or figure it out yourself). OpenEMR is being actively developed and new features and improvements are constantly being added.

PROS

* Extremely low cost of ownership. * Clean, easy to understand user interface and workflow. * Many functions can be enabled to add features or disabled to simplify the system with a massive but well-organized settings menu. * Very fast user interface and database when run on appropriate hardware. * Can be run on extremely fast and scalable Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a hosted system. * With AWS or another suitably designed and implemented system, you get ultra-reliable and near 100% uptime (100% except for scheduled database or software upgrades). * With AWS or another suitably designed and implemented system, you get the very best database management tools (such reliable backup and restore functions). You can also potentially access the database with other custom-written software. * Can be integrated with essentially any other system but often requires developing custom interfaces. * Infinitely customizable. * "Free" support from the developers and other power users instead of well-meaning but incompetent technical support staff who waste precious time to identify what the problem is, attempt to mark incidents are repaired when they actually aren't. * You never have to worry about a 3rd party software vendor holding your patient charts "hostage" as they raise prices or force you to use a crippled system that is not performing well. You have 100% control of your patient data instead of giving the keys to a profit-oriented entity that couldn't care less about your clinic.

CONS

* Requires either strong inhouse IT staff, staff with significant computer system skills and experience to install and maintain or hiring of an outside consultant. * The billing system is rudimentary, and we do not use it except to record the patient's insurance information. We enter our coding into our progress notes and then send them to our in-house billing staff. * The electronic prescribing system either requires cumbersome or expensive 3rd party integration or use of a separate system. I attempted one of the 3rd-party e-prescribing integrations, which is free ... except that I could not get it to work. It also turned out not to be true e-prescribing (uses faxes). Instead, we use stand-alone web-based MDTOOLBOX, which is reasonably priced, extremely powerful, efficient, reliable, and fast. It has an amazing feature that allows the physician to be prompted for expiring prescriptions, which can then be renewed -- saving countless hours dealing with certain faxed refill requests. The system also handles electronic refill requests seamlessly. In our progress notes, we indicate the medications are reviewed and reconciled in MDTOOLBOX. We also tried Allscripts' stand-alone web-based ePrescribe (now Veradigm ePrescribe), which is a decent system, but a little more expensive and more cumbersome/inefficient to set up and work with on a day-to-day basis compared to MDTOOLBOX. * "Free" support from the developers and other power users who are quite busy so somewhat limit

Anonymous

2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

3

EASE OF USE

1

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

1

FUNCTIONALITY

3

Reviewed February 2024

Worst Code Bases Ever

PROS

Open source and has most of the functionality you'd expect in an EMR

CONS

1- No support and very poor documentation 2- Poor API (Very few endpoints) 3- One of the worst code bases I have ever come across, Views have SQL queries, no standards, poor database design

Dr. Michael

Hospital & Health Care, 2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed June 2020

More than meets our needs.

We have run it successfully on the same server for over 8 years with no issues.

PROS

I was looking for something that would get me away from paper charts. In addition, I wanted something that was more robust and would allow for proper record keeping.

CONS

I wish it automatically could e0mail patient reminders.

Reason for choosing OpenEMR

HIPAA compliant and we own and control the server. While we are in Canada, it was quite easy to alter the program to meet Canadian requirements.

Kishore

Medical Practice, 2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed June 2021

Best free open-source php emr software

We have been using it for eight years so far from version 4.2.2 through 5.0.2 to 6.0.2 currently.The current version is very easy to utilize in a small but busy medical practice.

PROS

Easy to use.Multiple types of forms are available for data entry.Interface of openemr 6.0.2 is definitely silky smooth.It is suitable for our small practice which has 13,000 registered patients so far.

CONS

There is no dedicated mobile app developed yet.Browser-based interface is suitable but that would be a plus.