Ed,

We're the users in Kamloops that Tim G. mentioned above.  Like Tim, I'm not the vet but provide support to my wife's vet practice.  She and her vet partner also used Cornerstone as well as several other practice management packages over the years, and both are thrilled with OpenVPMS.  We see a lot of records coming in from other practices and it is universally agreed that ours are the best organized records of any of them.  And I guess that compared with other programs, the vets and support staff are finding this one much simpler and more intuitive to use.

As the computer guy, I was drawn to it because it's opensource and runs exceedingly well on Linux servers.  I understand that it works equally well in a Window's environment, but of this I have no direct experience.  The open-source nature of the project is extremely important to us.  For example, the record display defaults to a top-posting style, much in the way that most people write emails.  There is no means to easily select the bottom-posting order that the vets here were requesting.  But after an inquiry to the group, it was suggested that a simple change to two or three lines of code and a recompile of the source would provide the needed change.  So while not everyone would have the interest in doing so, with a little hand-holding, I was able to get that (and a few other desired changes) implemented.  This simply would not be possible using a closed-source product.

Out-of-the-box support for US/Canadian tax regimes is being implemented.  When we adopted OpenVPMS in 2014, there really was no support at all.  With a little tweaking of the reports, however, I was able to get OVPMS to apply and track both Provincial and Federal sales tax as is required here.  Our invoices and monthly reports are exactly what someone here would expect to see, and all of this was done merely by customizing the reports, with no change to the underlying database itself. So my point is that OVPMS is highly customizable at several levels.

While OVPMS is not yet ready to be installed and used straight-away in an American or Canadian practice, it is getting there.  And if you're willing to put in a bit of effort to make the adjustments you need while setting it up, I'm sure you'll find that in the end, the effort would have been well worthwhile.

I have to admit that I've found the demo system a bit frustrating since it necessarily runs in an environment where it is sometimes hard to see what the output would look like.  While I am not familiar with how it is set up, in many cases reports on the demo seem to fail because it is looking for a printer that doesn't exist.  And of course with all kinds of crazy and incomplete data being put in, lord knows what you'll see.

If you are interested in seeing what kinds of things can be produced, perhaps let me know and I can email you some of our practices typical documents (anonymized invoices, financial reports, certificates, etc.).  I think it may give a better feeling for how things can be customized.  Tony G. may also be able to provide output of some of the incredibly flexible templates he's been producing for version 1.9.  Also, if you're into virtualization, I could perhaps forward a VirtualBox appliance, a clone of our Linux server with a small sample database, that you could bring up on either a Linux or Windows desktop and tweak for your own environment.  Anyway, I'd be happy to help you through that if you want.

As you can see, we're pretty enthusiastic about it.  I have to admit, however, that we only take advantage of some of its capabilities.  For example, we feel we're too small to implement the stock-tracking features, and so just don't bother.  For other practices, I'm sure that is very important.  And finally, let me say that the support we have received from Tim G., Tim A., Ben, Tony and several others, has just been fantastic.  It is a very well planned, implemented and supported product and it has been a pleasure to work with them.  

Thanks for your interest,

Sam Longiaru

Aberdeen Veterinary Hospital

Kamloops, BC Canada