Doctor’s Office Uses VMware Player
This is so wrong. [grin] A doctor’s office uses OpenEMR (screenshots) a powerful FREE, open source Linux application to track patient care and handle billing. The kicker? Linux runs on top of Windows XP.
[tease]
Using OpenEMR in Family Practice (emphasis added)
(by Mark Leeds, Sunday January 29, 2006)
We are running OpenEMR from a virtual machine in our Family Practice office now with no problem.
We have been open for about 10 days now and we have been using OpenEMR from the first day with no problems. We use a virtual machine played with the free VMware player. It is a complete Linux system set up by Rod Roark with OpenEMR, Freeb, and SQL-Ledger.
The VM is run under Windows XP on a Toshiba laptop with a P4 1.8ghz and 1GB of RAM. In the morning, I load the VM and the other computers in the office, on the network, can log in by clicking on the desktop link to OpenEMR. At the end of the day, I back up the VM to a DVD.
Sometimes I take the laptop home to work and sometimes not. My staff has taken to it with no complaints. We have a hybrid system of keeping a limited paper chart and the EMR chart.
When I can afford it, I will upgrade to a nice fast desktop machine to run the VM with a fast, high capacity DVD writer.
I am now working on customizing OpenEMR a little to work better for us. To keep things simple, I make a copy of the VM to experiment with so I don’t mess up our real data or system. This is definitely the way things will be done in the future.
I highly recommend that physicians who want to save themselves a lot of headaches with EMR and practice management software should look into it.
Note that — to get started — the Dr. Leeds is using a not-very-beefy (!!) Windows XP laptop with the Linux OS and OpenEMR applications run in VMware Player bundle.
[OpenEMR is an independent open source project hosted by SourceForge. Rod Reed is one of the more active developers of OpenEMR over the past year or so. Rod packaged OpenEMR and associated applications as a VMware Virtual Player machine for Dr. Leeds.]
Bill and Melinda Gates probably wake up daily at 3:30 a.m. with cold chills when they realize that the operating system no longer matters. Their fabulous mansion with its 65-car garage may be at risk. Thanks to VMware (and similar solutions, including Virtual PC from Microsoft) it is simple (and with VMware, FREE…) to run Linux on top of Windows.
Prediction: Microsoft will eventually offer a Microsoft Linux distribution that will be certified to run on Virtual PC and Virtual PC Server. It may be bundled with Virtual PC, a la VMware Player.