The following is a list of new features and improvements in the 1.8 release. You should also check Known Issues and the Implementation Checklist.
OpenVPMS can now send and receive HL7 2.5 messages for select events, using the MLLP protocol. See:
A multi-day scheduling view has been added in order to better support boarding. This view is available to Schedule Views that have Multiple Day View enabled, from the Workflow - Scheduling screen.
Support has been added to find free appointment slots by Schedule View, Schedule, date range, time range and duration.
Appointments can now repeat on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis.
See Repeating Appointments for details.
The Appointment editor now displays the appointment duration, to help calculate boarding charges.
Product batches can now be tracked, during charging and dispensing.
This can be used to:
Batches are created via the Product|Batches screen, or by finalising a delivery that contains batch information.
Product templates can now:
See the Product Template documentation for more details.
OpenVPMS 1.8 extends support for multi-location practices.
In multi-location practices, a product can now have different prices depending on the Practice Location. This may be done using Pricing Groups or Service Ratios.
Pricing Groups allow individual products to have different prices. Each Practice Location may be assigned a Pricing Group; it will only see product prices that have:
Services Ratios allow product types to be assigned a service ratio per Practice Location. This ratio is used to calculate a new product price from its existing price, when it is used in a charge or estimate.
See Concepts|Pricing for details.
Customers can now be linked to a Practice Location to indicate their preferred practice location.
This can be used to support location specific content in reminders and statements.
The Investigations screen has been updated to include a Location filter, to query patient investigations by practice location.
The Work In Progress screen has been updated to include a Location filter, to query charges by practice location.
Products can now nominate a preferred supplier for a given stock location.
This is used by Generate Orders, and overrides any default preferred supplier specified by a product.
Discounts can now be disabled at a given Practice Location. This is primarily designed for practices that provide out-of-hours services where discounting is not used.
When discounts are disabled:
When editing patient referrals, the referring vet can now be searched for by practice name.
Stock quantities for a given Stock Location and product set can now be exported and imported using the Products|Stock Management screen. This facilitates the stocktake process.
The Appointment Reason lookup has been renamed to Visit Reason, and is now used by both Appointments and Visits to indicate the reason for visit.
Previously, Visits had a free form Reason text field to indicate the reason for visit. This has moved to a new Summary field.
The patient summary now includes:
See Patients - Information for more details.
A special breed 'New Breed' has been added to make it easier to enter new patients whose breed is not currently catalogued. See here.
Setting a patient's Deceased Date now automatically inactivates the patient. See here.
Patient Problems can now be classified with a Presenting Complaint and/or Diagnosis.
A default set of Presenting Complaint and Diagnosis codes are included from the VeNom Codes.
The Problems tab of Patient|Medical Records has been restructured so that it now has a similar look and feel to the Summary tab. In addition:
Patient reminders can now be sent out via SMS to customers. To enable this:
In addition, Reminder Types can be configured to override a customer's default reminder method by selecting the SMS check box.
Stopper Reminders now have Completed status when they are saved. Previously they had In Progress status, which meant they appeared in the patient summary until Reporting|Reminders - Send All was run.
The Reminder Export Format now includes the last recorded weight for the patient.
The Investigations screen has been enhanced:
Support has been added to open the cash drawer associated with a till.
This can be triggered:
This feature is configured via Administration - Organisation - Till.
Support has been added automatically lock a user's OpenVPMS session after a period of inactivity. A dialog is displayed, prompting for the user's password.
This feature is configured via Administration - Organisation - Practice.
The Customer Invoice, Counter Sale, Credit and Estimate report templates have been updated to:
The standard reports (found in <OPENVPMS-HOME>/reports/Reporting/Reports) have been revised to:
Application objects such as the current Practice, Practice Location, Customer and Patient are now available to reports.
See Application Fields and Application Fields as Report Parameters for more details.
Transactions that have been reversed may now be excluded from customer statements. This can be done:
Note that the Statement report template needs to be updated to use this.
The format of customer, patient, and supplier document file names can now be specified via File Name Formats. These can be assigned to individual Document Templates.
New JXPath extension functions are available, that may be used in reports and archetypes:
The 5.6 version of iReports is now supported. This provides a useful DataRange class which allows report writers to set date parameters to useful defaults such as ‘start of last month’, and ‘end of last year’. Also SQL reports containing sub-reports can be previewed. You can also use the Groovy language – this provides better date manipulation facilities than the standard Java language.
However, see Known Problems.
Charges and estimates may now suppress printing of line items with a zero total, by unchecking the Print box.
Note that this option is not available if the line item was generated from a template with Print Aggregate selected.
The customer and patient data displayed in the left panel has been improved as follows:
See for example here.
The syntax of the Relative Date facility has been expanded to allow the specification of the start or end of a relative week, month, quarter or year. See here.
The variables $appointment and $task have been added to enable access to appointment and task information. See here.
These are now supported but need to be enabled. See here.
The email write window has been enhanced to allow the use of CC and BCC addressees. Multiple addressees can also be entered. An address book facility has been added to allow easy selection of addressees. Also, users can now have contact information so that their contact details can be recorded. This also allows emails to be easily CC'ed or BCC'ed to staff members. See here.
The docload tool has been integrated into the web application, launched as a scheduled job. See Job Configuration: Document Loader for configuration instructions.
When reporting an error, a contact email address can be included. See Concepts|Error Handling.
An At-Cost discount type has been added, and also a warning if the applied discounts would reduce the sell price below the cost price. See Concepts|Discounts.
The Macro window can now be displayed by pressing Alt-M when editing invoices in the Visit Editor.
A Customer Note facility has been added to invoices and estimates. This allows more patient-related information to be added to the estimate and invoice.
Patient microchips can now capture the implant site and date.
Customer's patients can now be sorted on the ownership/location relationship dates.
The following is a checklist for existing users upgrading to the 1.8 release. It provides a list of things that you may need to do in order to take advantages of the new features in this release. They are in no particular order. Note that the totally new features (like the HL7 stuff) are not included here.
The database migration script will do some of the work required, in that it will create or modify the authorities, but you will need to check that the Roles that you use have the required authorities.
This page documents any known issues that may cause problems. Note that it does not list problems reported against earlier releases of OpenVPMS that are not yet resolved, but rather issues that may cause you problems with this release.
Reports that include parameters that have default values that use other parameters are no longer supported.
This may affect users that have customised the standard reports.
This is due to a bug in JasperReports - see here.
For workarounds to this issue, see here.
Note that a common symptom of this problem is that the report runs happily with iReports preview but when run in OpenVPMS generates no output.
If you set up a series of weekly appointments and then modify 'from this point on' in the middle of the series, AND the new timings overlap with the old, then on first day of the modifed set, there will be a duplicated appointment - ie that day will show both the appointment for the old start/end times and the one for the new start/end times.
If the new times do not overlap the old, then there is no duplication.
The work around is to simply delete the appointment with the original times on the 'from this point on' date.