The following is a list of new features and improvements in the 2.1 release. You should also check Known Issues and the Implementation Checklist.
Features in this release include:
OpenVPMS can now make gap insurance claims, via PetSure VetHub
These are claims where the insurer determines the benefit for a claim, before any invoices are paid, and the customer pays the gap. The insurer then re-imburses the practice.
A new workspace has been added to support insurance claim reporting.
See Reporting - Insurance for more details.
Multiple charge and estimate items may now be selected for deletion.
Previously, they were restricted to being deleted one at a time.
When editing multi-patient charges and estimates (e.g. in Customers - Charges or Customers - Estimates or during Check-Out), the patient summary can now be displayed by clicking on the button.
Letters attached to products will now prompt for any parameters when the product is invoiced.
The default Expiry Date for estimates can now be configured by the Estimate Expiry option of the Practice.
To ensure that the correct clinician is recorded when an estimate is invoiced, the clinician is now prompted for unless:
Service ratios may now have a calendar linked to them, to determine when the service ratio applies. See Service Ratios for more details.
Statement printing can now be performed from both Customers - Accounts and Reporting - Debtors. Options include printing, previewing or emailing:
Previously, statements could only be printed from Reporting - Debtors.
Cubex users can now control when pharmacy orders are discontinued, by setting the Pharmacy Order Discontinue Period option on the Practice.
By default, pharmacy orders are discontinued when an invoice is finalised. This option allows order discontinuation to occur after an invoice is finalised.
Patient check-in has now been simplified. Previously, the steps:
were each displayed in separate windows. These have now been merged into a single window.
Schedules may also specify a default Work List, in order to automatically create a Task for a patient on Check-In.
To ensure that the correct clinician is recorded during a Consult, the clinician is now prompted for at the start of the Consult workflow unless:
Rostering of employees to areas in a practice location is now supported.
See How To - Rostering for more details.
For more details, see Deputy Integration.
Scheduling and Work Lists can now be configured to automatically refresh to display new and updated appointments and tasks.
This is determined by the Scheduling Refresh option of the Practice, which sets the interval between refreshes.
This also affects the new Rostering workspace.
Free Appointment Slots can now be searched by clinician.
This will only return those slots that the clinician is rostered on to.
The selected appointment in Workflow - Scheduling and task in Workflow - Work Lists are now available for use in macros. These may be accessed using the $appointment and $task variables, respectively.
These can simplify generating SMS messages and emails to customers.
See Sample Expressions for examples.
Customer and patient alerts can now be flagged as being mandatory alerts.
When a customer or patient is selected that has a mandatory alert, the alert will be displayed in a popup window. The user must acknowledge the alert to continue.
A user only needs to be acknowledge an alert once in a 24 hour period.
See Concepts - Alerts for more details.
The customer and patient summary alert display has been improved:
This also applies to the alerts displayed when editing appointments.
Patient history is now displayed while editing Notes and Addendum records.
This makes it much easier to review existing history, and to copy text.
The patient search launched by Patients - Information - Select and Patients - Medical Records - Select can now supports patient selection by customer, patient and/or contact.
Patient history in Medical Records Summary and the Visit Summary can now be filtered on Product Type. This can be used to quickly find vaccinations for example.
Patient History preferences now have a History Sort Order option to determine the order that Visits are displayed in.
In multi-location practices, users now only see the Stock Locations associated with their Practice Locations. Previously, they could see all Stock Locations.
This improves access control.
This affects:
Scheduled reports can now be configured to run with calculated date parameters e.g. "End of Year", "July 1 - Last Year", "June 30".
Previously, only fixed dates could be used.
See Scheduled Report- Parameters for more details.
Caches for appointments, tasks, calendars and lookups can now be configured via the Application Caches window, launched from Administration - System - Caches.
Previously, these could only be set in configuration files.
The mail server timeout is now configurable via the Timeout field of Mail Server.
Previously, this could only be set in configuration files.
System diagnostics may now be viewed in the Diagnostics window, launched from Administration - System - Diagnostics.
This can aid quick diagnosis of problems where access to the server or database is limited.
The following is a checklist for existing users upgrading to the 2.1 release and is aimed at both the person doing the upgrade and the administrators responsible for systems operations.
It provides a list of things that you may need to do in order to take advantages of the new features in this release.
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.
See OVPMS-2155 for a description and workarounds. This has been fixed in the OpenVPMS 2.1.1 release.
In OpenVPMS 2.1.1, the batch expiry does not update during charging and available batches are not shown in the Medication editor (see OVPMS-2184). This has been fixed for the OpenVPMS 2.1.2 release.
If you create an Email Template using an Open Office odt document as its content, and that document contains two adjacent User Fields separated by one space, eg
(here shown after using Ctrl-F9 to reveal the field content)
Then when this shows in the email you may see "Dear MrBloggs" rather than the expected "Dear Mr Bloggs".
The work-around is either to replace the space by a non-breaking space (entered using Ctrl-Shift-space on Windows or Option-Space on a Mac) or use two spaces instead of one. [In the second case, normal HTML processing will replace consecutive spaces by a single space.]
If you use the External Edit facility to edit an Open Office document, AND you are using Java 8 update 112 or later then a Java security check window appears each time you use External Edit and its 'do not show this again' checkbox does not work. See also OVPMS-1889