OpenEMR Success Stories

Overview

Placing clinic success stories here. Can be entries such as:

• A review type entry (a snapshot in time) on this page
• A link to an article/blog/sourceforge review/case study entry
• A link to a blog that describes the deployment over time

Siaya District Hospital in Kenya Goes Live With OpenEMR in April 2012

We are a start-up in the Bay Area of California called MediGrail LLC. We think of our company as having a profit and a non-profit side. The OpenEMR implementation described below is a part of the latter.

Application Custom reports have been developed for the user and SnoMED and ICD 9 databases are installed. The current project is converting to ICD 10 codes and is experiencing some issues with it. Populated the pharmacy and are printing patient payment receipts. It is tracking inventory. Auto-incrementing patient ID is also configured. The application team's biggest challenge was to define ACLs for each department and their heads.

Goal The whole team including management has been very clear on the overall goal that everybody is working towards. Last year the facility saw roughly 120,000 patient encounters and the goal of the automation is to double that!

Team-building We set user expectations, provided role definitions, and helped in team formation.

Training The user-base is not trained in computing technologies other than extensive use of cell feature phone SMS. The support team at Siaya also needs formal systems and applications training. Before going live, the application team engaged in "Train the Trainers" (TOTs) activity. The TOTs then engaged in training the staff while the support staff made themselves available to answer questions.

Installation time-frame December 2011 to January 2012

Location Western, rural Kenya and the government facility is called Siaya District Hospital

Contact Dr. Omoto Jackton, telephone +254-721-761484, Yudhvir Singh Sidhu, 408 677 7660 cell

• We encourage you to call the team in Siaya during our daily morning staff meetings 8 - 9 am EAT.

• They are 10 hours ahead of PDT. It is 10 pm in California when it is 8 am in Siaya.
• There is a USA phone number - area code 408. Please contact Yudhvir to coordinate. We want you to know the names of the staff and have you scheduled in the meeting.

Address Medical Superintendent, Siaya District Hospital, P. O. BOX 144 Siaya, Kenya, Postal Code 40600

When Siaya District Hospital goes live 13 April 2012

What Automated a 220-bed hospital - network, workstations, servers, and UPS

Who Created a team split in 4 groups: the systems administrators, Facilities manager, IT manager, and applications administrators. This team consists of Siaya people and the MediGrail staff members.

Equipment

• An Intel Atom Supermicro server with 4 GB RAM and a 32 GB SSD drive which is the firewall and a Linux boot server - running pfSense (pfsense.org)
• An Intel Atom Supermicro server with 4 GB RAM and a 2 TB drive which is the file server, IM server and future inter-department phone switch running on Ubuntu Linux and mounting user directories via sshfs.
• Intel Xeon Sun server with 6 GB RAM and two drives which is the application server during the day and backup server at night. The application is ofcourse OpenEMR (open-emr.org) and bacula.org for backups.
• The backbone is provided by HP Procurve 9078a 24-port Gigabit switches connected via Fiber Optic cables
• Currently 40 Panasonic toughbook laptops
• Inverting Opti-ups UPS and APC UPS

Network The systems administration team laid over 9,000 feet of network cabling in conduit and terminated all the endpoints. Installed 3 switches and connected them via Fiber Optic cable runs. The network will expand to 5 switches and each will be protected by voltage regulators and UPS.

Workstations We had to change our original thin-client stand-alone workstation design to laptops because you cannot reliably ship equipment to Kenya. The equipment went with us on the airplane. The workstations have a minimum of 512 MB RAM, no hard drive and no battery. This is intentional given the sensitivity of the data. Laptops boot off the network into a very small 55 MB footprint Linux distribution called Slitaz. It contains Abiword, Gunmeric spreadsheet, Firefox browser, a PDF viewer, and a file server mount utility called sshfs.

Power Creating a stable and clean power source is a major challenge at the facility and one which we are currently struggling with. An additional challenge is that the user expects at-least the phones to work during an outage. While the staff was being trained, the workstation power cables started to melt from the excessive voltages and voltage fluctuations. We have learned the hard way that power cables from the US are rated only at 130 VAC and perform poorly at the higher 230 VAC continuous loads.

Backups The application is backed up on an aggressive schedule using automysqlbackup. The file server is backed up using Bacula and the firewall is backed up via a shell script.

Monitoring The servers report their status to a private Twitter account on an hourly basis.

Please Contact Yudhvir at sidhu@medigrail.com if you have questions about the project.