OpenEMR Success Stories

Overview

Plan to place 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

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

*  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, sidhu@medigrail.com
*  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. We had to take all the equipment on the airplane with us.
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.