New in 1.8

Complete

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.

 

HL7 2.5

OpenVPMS can now send and receive HL7 2.5 messages for select events, using the MLLP protocol. See:

Appointments

Multi-day Schedules

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.

Find Free Appointment Slots

Support has been added to find free appointment slots by Schedule View, Schedule, date range, time range and duration.

Repeating Appointments

Appointments can now repeat on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis.

See Repeating Appointments for details.

Appointment Duration

The Appointment editor now displays the appointment duration, to help calculate boarding charges.

Products

Product Batches

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

Product templates can now:

See the Product Template documentation for more details.

Multi-Location Practice Support

OpenVPMS 1.8 extends support for multi-location practices.

Location-Specific Pricing

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.

Location Specific Reminders and Statements

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.

Investigations

The Investigations screen has been updated to include a Location filter, to query patient investigations by practice location.

Work In Progress

The Work In Progress screen has been updated to include a Location filter, to query charges by practice location.

Stock Location Preferred Supplier

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.

Disabling Discounts

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:

Search for Referring Vet via Practice

When editing patient referrals, the referring vet can now be searched for by practice name.

Stock Quantity Export/Import

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.

Visit Classification

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.

Patient

Patient Summary

The patient summary now includes:

See Patients - Information for more details.

New Breed

A special breed 'New Breed' has been added to make it easier to enter new patients whose breed is not currently catalogued.  See here.

Deceased Date

Setting a patient's Deceased Date now automatically inactivates the patient. See here.

Patient Problems

Classification

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.

Problem Summary

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:

Reminders

SMS Reminders

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

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.

Reminder Export

The Reminder Export Format now includes the last recorded weight for the patient.

Investigations

The Investigations screen has been enhanced:

Opening Cash Drawers

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.

Auto Lock Screen

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.

Reporting

Report Templates

The Customer Invoice, Counter Sale, Credit and Estimate report templates have been updated to:

Revised Reports

The standard reports (found in <OPENVPMS-HOME>/reports/Reporting/Reports) have been revised to:

Application Fields

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.

Transaction Reversal Suppression

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.

Document File Names

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.

JXPath Extension Functions

New JXPath extension functions are available, that may be used in reports and archetypes:

iReports Version

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.

Miscellaneous Improvements

Zero Total Print Suppression in Charges and Estimates

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.

Left Panel

The customer and patient data displayed in the left panel has been improved as follows:

See for example here.

Relative Date

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.

Macro Variables

The variables $appointment and $task have been added to enable access to appointment and task information.  See here.

Rabies Tags

These are now supported but need to be enabled. See here.

Multiple To, CC, and BCC addresses when emailing

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.

Automatic Document Loading

The docload tool has been integrated into the web application, launched as a scheduled job. See Job Configuration: Document Loader for configuration instructions.

Contact Email on Error Reports

When reporting an error, a contact email address can be included. See Concepts|Error Handling.

Discounts

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.

Display Macro Window in Visit Editor

The Macro window can now be displayed by pressing Alt-M when editing invoices in the Visit Editor.

Customer Notes

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.

Microchip Implant Site and Date

Patient microchips can now capture the implant site and date.

Sorting Customer's Patients

Customer's patients can now be sorted on the ownership/location relationship dates.

Implementation Checklist

Complete

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.

  • If you use estimates, then you should review your templates to set high/low quantities.
     
  • If you want to include staff on emails, then you need to add email contacts for each staff member.
     
  • If you want to SMS customers in another country, ensure that their contact phone number includes the + prefix and country code.
     
  • Review your product templates to see if you can take advantage of the ability of templates to include other templates.
     
  • Review your product templates to see if you can make use of the weight-based inclusion facility.
     
  • Review your product templates to see if you can make use of the zero price facility. Note that if you do not want zero-priced items to appear on the customer’s invoice, then you will need to adjust your invoice etc document templates to suppress line items that have a zero price.
     
  • If you wish invoices etc to show product templates with an aggregated amount rather than the individual products that the template included, then you need to set the Print Aggregate flag on those templates for which you want this to occur. If your invoices etc order products via their Product Type's Invoice Order field, then you also need to set the Product Type for those templates where you set the Print Aggregate flag. Your invoice etc (ie invoice, credit, counter sale and estimate) document templates will also need to be updated. The templates in the release package support aggregation but not the Invoice Order field.
     
  • If you have a setup which has multiple practice locations, with customers normally associated with a specific location, then consider setting the Practice Location field for those customers. This will allow you to generate Reminders and Statements for customers selected via their Practice Location. You could also use the customer's Practice Location to allow the use of location specific information in invoices etc.  If so, you will need to make changes to your invoice etc document templates to take advantage of this facility.
     
  • If you want to take advantage of the transaction hide facility, you will need to adjust your statement document template(s).
     
  • If you want to use location based pricing, then you need to set up the Pricing Groups - see here.  If you already using location based pricing by selling different products at different locations (eg xxxxx for normal customers, and HC-xxxxx for house call customers) then you will need to also deactivate the HC- versions of each product.
     
  • If you want to use the At-Cost discount facility to allow you to sell to staff at a Cost-Plus rate, then you will need to set up the At-Cost discount(s) – and almost certainly adjust the maximum discounts set for the products. See here.
     
  • If you want to SMS reminders, then all document templates used for reminders need to have their SMS field set.
     
  • If you want to personalise or add identifiers to generated document names, then you need to edit the document templates to have a File Name Format.
     
  • If you currently use a cron job or the windows task scheduler to regularly run the docloader utility to import documents, then you should switch to using the OpenVPMS scheduled version (because it is more efficient).
     
  • If you are going to use the new Customer Notes facility and you wish these notes to appear on your printed invoices and estimates, then you will need to amend their document templates.  Note that the invoice templates packaged with the release (in the <OpenVPMS-Home>\reports\Customer\Invoice folders include Customer Note printing.
     
  • If you use fine grained authorities to control who can do what, you will need to check the following:
  1. users who have to manage appointments need to be able to create/remove/save the act.customerAppointmentSeries archetype as well as the act.customerAppointment archetype
  2. users who previously needed the Entity Relationships Create/Remove/Save authorities will also need Entity Links Create/Remove/Save authorites for the archetypes entityLink.*
  3. users who have to manage HL7 messages need to be given the HL7 Message Act Create/Remove/Save authorities.

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.

Known Issues

Complete

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.

Reporting

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.

Appointment Series

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.