OSCAR has numerous improvements that will soon be making it into your hands. Improvements such as integrated fax, electronic signature support for prescriptions, template and rich text support for letter generation, better document management, and improved 3rd party application support with read and write system access.

This OSCAR refresh supports consent driven multi-site data sharing, which is of particular interest to large distributed health groups that need to share information between clinics, while each maintains their own locally installed and independent servers.

What this means to you is improved workflow within your practice.

Inbound documents are handled the same way as inbound labs. You will have access to a unified inbox for all inbound clinical information, regardless of how it originated or what format it arrived in. Furthermore, with the integrated fax, these documents can get into your system without hours of scanning and paper handling by your staff.

The electronic signature support in the improved Rx module creates a unique instance of the prescriber’s signature, obtained at the time the prescription is signed, as mandated by the Ontario College of Pharmacists and others. You can electronically sign your prescription and fax it off to the patient’s pharmacy of choice, all at the push of a button – no more paper required.

OSCAR provides a new facility to support clinicians with the requirement to generate nicely formatted letters, including the ability to template letters using pre-generated results from different parts of the patient record.

The most powerful new capability within OSCAR is it’s ability to support 3rd party application development with both read and write access to the underlying infrastructure. New applications will be able to leverage the underlying system in a way that will allow these applications to talk with one another, and to the rest of OSCAR. The application sandbox has now gotten a lot bigger and more powerful.

OSCAR has become the #3 EMR in Ontario within the new OntarioMD funding program.

OSCAR has 14.5% market share of newly funded users, just behind Healthscreen’s 20.3% and Practice Solutions’ 23.5%.

Ontario’s New EMR Adoption Program (832 funded physicians from October 2009 to August 31, 2010):

This is a massive increase of new users in Ontario compared to the previous funding program, which OSCAR achieved a 3.4% share of the funded market, and a total overall ranking of #8.

Indivica’s business has been growing rapidly. We are currently expanding our team to meet the needs of our customers and to develop exciting new products.

If you are passionate about the delivery of innovative technology and the transformation of Health IT, and want to work in the dynamic and fast paced world of a start up, then check out the currently available opportunities listed in our new Careers page.

We are very happy to welcome to the OSCAR community Queen’s Family Health Team, Department of Family Medicine, Queen’s University.

If you visited one of their four clinics this week, you may have noticed the staff a little more wide-eyed than normal.

Queen’s has been using an EMR for many years, and so the conversion from their old system to OSCAR has been quite an activity. Countless hours of preparation and planning have gone into making the transition as seamless as possible.

At 8:30 on June 7th the first patients were being seen. Soon thereafter, records were being entered, results were being reviewed, forms and requisitions where being filled, and the first prescriptions were being electronically signed and faxed to the local pharmacies.

A collection of clinics with well over 100 users needs some reasonable hardware to run their practice. Queen’s primary server, an OSCAR 750, has dual quad core hyper threaded Xeon CPUs coupled with a non trivial amount of memory.

EMR conversions are pretty intensive operations. Tens of thousands of medical records have to be meticulously moved and reviewed to ensure data integrity and patient information is maintained.

Throughout the process is important to maintain good sense of humour and to remember why you decided to move to a new EMR in the first place.

Thank you Queen’s for to moving to OSCAR.

Say goodbye to that “third person” in your examining rooms.

OSCAR is the only Ontario Certified EMR platform that runs on the Apple iPad. This fact is true because OSCAR is a standards based web application that has not been hardwired into a specific operating system or web browser.

OSCAR clinicians today are currently experiencing the joys of engaging their patients using the unobtrusive iPad technology. Early feedback has been extremely encouraging, although there are still some issues to work through (native printing within the iPad is not currently supported, however, there is an app for that).

iPad and iPad-like technology will revolutionize your engagement with your patients and, if you are an OSCAR user, you are already good to go.

OSCAR users – isn’t it nice to know that you picked the right solution, one that was mindful of the pervasive transformative technology trends? Congratulations.

(Yes – this is a big deal)

Today, Indivica announces the availability of a new range of OSCAR servers based on the latest industry hardware and software platforms.

The all new OSCAR 310, OSCAR 510 & OSCAR 750 servers from Indivica are built with the new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit server operating system and the latest i5, i7, and Xeon CPUs from Intel.

The new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS platform delivers today’s most advanced and stable operating environment while having the capability to leverage the newest hardware available on the market today.

The OSCAR 750 Series server is truly a massively powerful platform for the most demanding clinical environments. Dual Intel Xeon Quad Core Nehalem CPUs leverage 24 GBs of RAM, raided 2 TB disk drives and twin GB Ethernet to deliver OSCAR at phenomenal speeds.

The OSCAR 510 Series drives your OSCAR EMR via Intel’s new Quad Core i7 CPU, 8 GBs of RAM and a blazingly fast 1.5 TB disk. The OSCAR 510 is perfect for your ever growing practice.

The new entry level OSCAR 310 Series servers have been completely redesigned, delivering Intel i5 Quad Core power, with 4 GBs of RAM and a 1 TB disk drive. Incredibly, the new OSCAR 310 is available at the very same price as the previous entry level model. Just $999.

For more information, visit the Indivica OSCAR Store.

Shelter Lee has posted videos from the recent BC Oscar User Group Meeting.

The first one is here and the rest can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=310FF13164E7AB03.

One of the major reasons that people choose OSCAR is our vibrant and extensive community of users and supporters.

When we get together, as we did recently in Vancouver, for a user’s group meeting, it has become customary to hand out a few OSCARs in recognition to the exceptional contribution of specific individuals to the OSCAR ecosystem.

This year’s recipients are as worthy a bunch of OSCAR as ever.

Awards were received by:

• Randy Jonasz- Developer of the year
• Trudy Chiswell -Longstanding contribution to the OSCAR community
• Shelter Lee-Best volunteer developer
• Gunther Klein (“super G”)-OSCAR volunteer of the year
• Gianna Tanner -OSCAR Goddess( MOA of the year)
• Best New Practice -Highland Medical Practice of Comox, BC.
• Tomislav Svoboda-OSCAR Achievement Award
• Gordon Hutchinson –Best New user
• David Page – OSCAR user of the year
• Patti Rodger Kirkpatrick and Claire Dickson share the- OSCAR volunteer of the year award

Congratulations to all.

For more details about the award winners, you can see the full post on the OSCAR Canada website.

The BC OSCAR User Group invites you to come and hear about Free / Open Source software and how physicians and midwives are driving the OSCAR (Open Source Clinical Application Resource) Electronic Medical Record in BC. There will be a presentation by Dr David Chan, from McMaster University, OSCAR’s founder, and the OSCAR user community in BC. OSCAR users will demonstrate the EMR including use with voice recognition software, tools for maternity and newborn care, leading chronic disease management tools, prescribing tools, billing and much more!

OSCAR is an open-source (free), Canadian EMR, developed by a collaborative community of programmers and users. Users pay no licensing costs and have the freedom to choose from a range of support companies. There are over a thousand OSCAR users and over a million patients on the system nationally, and it has won several prestigious awards for IT innovation. It’s ease of use, excellence in programming, high level of functionality, and low costs for ongoing support and implementation, are part of why OSCAR is experiencing rapid growth.

For more information visit http://www.oscarcanada.org/

Where:
Paetzold Auditorium VGH,
Jim Patterson Pavilion on the 1st floor
(Parking is available at 2775 Laurel St, between 11th and 12th)

When:
Monday, April 19, 2010 – 6:30 pm to 9:00pm

Cost:
Free

RSVP :
http://tinyurl.com/ydyfebe

You are invided to the next BC OSCAR User Group Meeting: Monday April 19th and Tuesday April 20, 2010. The event will be held at in Vancouver at the Paetzold Auditorium at Vancouver General Hospital.

The agenda for the BC OSCAR user group meeting is available here and includes many interactive sessions for learning more about OSCAR and sharing experiences with other OSCAR users.

Please register to reserve your space.