Re: [Health] requesting assistance for GNU health data interchange

[Chris]

I have nothing really to add. That was a great summary. If you are
interested in working on FHIR, that's great! We could use the help. =-)

-C

PS: For very simple database dumps, you can simply export patient info
into CSV or similar format. Nothing fancy there.

On 10/19/14, Emilien Klein wrote:
> Hi Nasia,
> 
> 2014-10-19 17:18 GMT+02:00 Nasia Santos <address@hidden>:
> > Greetings!
> >
> >      This is Nasia Santos, a Computer Science student from Asia Pacific
> > College here in the Philippines. We're enrolled in a Project Based Learning
> > track and currently working on the possibility of applying e-health (GNU
> > Health) for a specific organization.
> > In line with this, we are supposed to integrate and connect GNU health to
> > OpenMRS (an electronic medical record system) with the intention of
> > exchanging patient medical records between the two systems. May we ask your
> > assistance in recommending anything that would enable GNU Health to send and
> > receive data.
> 
> Which type of information exchange do you have in mind when mentioning
> "exchanging patient medical records"? The entire and complete data
> about all or specific patients, or at least for example the
> demographics (e.g. patient ID, name, date of birth, gender, address),
> then lab results, maybe some documents?
> 
> In particular about the scenario you describe, what data do you have
> in OpenMRS versus data you have in GNU Health? Which data are you
> looking at exchanging, and in which direction (to/from OpenMRS and
> to/from GNU Health)?
> 
> In any case: the most used standard for exchanging patient information
> in the healthcare sector is using the HL7 standard [0] [1]. Note that
> eventhough version 3 (XML based) is already more than a decade old
> (develpment even started in 1995), in between systems of a hospital
> (as is the case you describe here) the version 2 of the standard
> (character-delimeted text) is most widely used. A new initiative
> called FHIR is currently being developed as well, but is not yet
> widely in use (by far).
> 
> [0] http://www.hl7.org/index.cfm
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Level_7
> 
> Another term you might hear about is IHE [2] [3], which in the context
> we are discussing is an organization whose goal is to clarify the use
> of the HL7 standard for specific data interchange.
> 
> [2] http://ihe.net/
> [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrating_the_Healthcare_Enterprise
> 
> There are current discussions/preliminary implementation going on to
> add support for HL7 (a demographics query using HL7 according to the
> IHE rules, and adding support for a patient demographics query using
> HL7 FHIR). But as of right now, using HL7 for these interchanges is
> not yet a reality.
> There are currently no active projects within GNU Health for
> developing HL7 interfaces for other data types such as lab orders or
> results.
> 
> I am not familiar with OpenMRS. Looking at their wiki documentation
> [4], it looks like there is minimal support for HL7 in OpenMRS:
> - An incoming A28 message will create a new patient in OpenMRS.
> - ORU messages will send result messages (e.g. for lab blood orders)
> into OpenMRS.
> 
> [4] https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/HL7
> 
> One option could be to use the Mirth [5] interface engine to read
> directly into the database of GNU Health, and have that software
> create HL7 messages. I believe some other users of GNU Health use this
> strategy.
> 
> [5] http://www.mirthcorp.com/products/mirth-connect
> 
> Maybe other members of the projects could inform you if there are
> other options to exchange information (other ways to make direct
> database reads, or maybe structured/XML exports) that are used by some
> organizations?
> 
> Please tell us more about your use case, to see where we can help.
>     +Emilien
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