By EHRSolutions on

Is anyone working on, or has anyone thought about creating an Electronic Health Record module for Drupal?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

klausd’s picture

klausd commented

Actually I'm trying to find out if Drupal is the right choice for this task (this would be for a German website) and I would appreciate any hints or examples.

Dimitri Raptis’s picture

Dimitri Raptis commented

Hi,

My personal feeling is that Drupal can act as the basis of an open source EHR system.

I have developed some open source Clinical Trial Management Systems on Drupal that were very well received by the users. One is completed: www.mri-evaluation.com and one is underway: www.single-port-rct.com

I am seriously thinking in designing an open source EHR system for developing countries or for peripheral/district hospital with not much available funding.

I am a doctor myself and have access to many hospitals in order to implement, evaluate and re-design the drupal EHR platform.

If anyone would like to collaborate on this, please let me know, it should also provide a publication.

Looking forward to your opinion.

Best wishes,

Dimitri

ndube1989’s picture

ndube1989 commented

How do we download the open source software?? When i visit those sites access to download is denied. Are there any other alternatives to creating an EHR in Drupal??

bigbangthings’s picture

bigbangthings commented

Did you happen to get your work done and vision implemented ?

heine’s picture

heine commented

Depending on what you want, flexinode may be sufficient. On the other hand, Drupal itself may not be suitable. A good module can do a lot however.

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jsloan’s picture

jsloan commented

Would the module be a "view" of an existing EMR for either the patient or the physician? In this case then a module (or modules) within the Drupal framework may make sense. Secure access and user authentication would be your biggest burden, the queries and views displayed in a page would be staightforward depending on the EMR platform itself.

If you need to create and maintain an EMR for a medical practice or clinical scenario I would suggest looking at existing Open Source offerings.

openEMR may be a good one to research because it is PHP/mySQL based, simple, and being marketed by a couple of companies. see: http://www.pennfirm.com/ and http://www.synitech.com/

I work for a large hospital and have prototyped web based EMR "viewing" applications. We ended up co-developing a java/jsp application with a vendor that now markets it (non-open source).

- jim

dado’s picture

dado commented

In a way, Drupal is the opposite of an EHR.

Drupal: many users, 1 unifying subject
EHR: 1 user, many subjects (the patients)

Traditional EHRs are more of a data repository with reporting features, no? Little or no collaboration or sharing personal info. Not that I am endorsing this.

Maybe you are onto something. Primary care doctor = admin. Patients = low level users who the doctor creates. Patients have permission to "edit my record" analogous to "edit my blog". They can also view their own record. A record includes nodes from several types: lab data, clinical record, etc.

Consulting doctors would be users w/ more permissions.

You would need lots of new modules:
clinical decision support
export my EHR as XML,
XML-RPC HL7 hook-up to laboratories,
advanced reporting & graphing capabilities that I have not seen in Drupal.

Other doctors could get accounts and you could have doctors only discussion areas, blogging, etc. Ah and you could use the drupal module so specialists log in using the same user id & password to access any (primary care) drupal based EHR. Cool.

So basically you could achieve something toward an EHR using Drupal which might also get you a step toward the future, where patients have more control and access to their records, and doctors actually collaborate.

dado
http://schtickdisc.org

EHRSolutions’s picture

EHRSolutions commented

The new mods you mentioned are right on the money, and you would also need to consider Clinical Reminders, CPT Codes, billing, etc.

The push is to make a truly portable (accessible) medical record, and I think Drupal could easily fit the bill.

Any takers?

dado’s picture

dado commented

On the flip side...

One issue is that there are approx 1 billion EHR products out there already, some open source. Then there's the small matter that you are talking about a mountain of work. (Not that it couldn't happen or wouldn't be worthwhile.)

Also I have some qualms about Drupal. It is a platform in a lot of flux, and the learning curve is extensive. I tend to think object oriented system would be more up to the task. Perhaps Ruby on Rails based? Just my opinion.

dado
http://schtickdisc.org

EHRSolutions’s picture

EHRSolutions commented

I posted the comment here...I've actually looked at the open source options, but they don't have the refinement of Drupal...

But, I need the Drupal experts to tell me if it's viable.

dado’s picture

dado commented

I am sure I do not speak for all of Drupal.

dado
http://schtickdisc.org

jsloan’s picture

jsloan commented

... I have no doubt that Drupal would be a viable platform for maintaining EMR's. Since your initial posting and the comments from Dr. Donohue I thought through most of the features required and didn't find anything that Drupal could not handle.

As a preliminary exercise I would recommend that you download and install the openEMR http://sourceforge.net/projects/openemr
It installs easily in a minute and the documentation is good. Take an inventory of it's features and try to map the features to existing Drupal features. What does not map is where the work lies. Then it is time to decide if the work is worth it.

In the end there will be three choices:
1. Use openEMR
2. Use openEMR and integrate Drupal.*
3. Rewrite using the Drupal module framework.

* note: Item #2 may be a transitional phase on the way to #3. In the beginning use openEMR as is and compliment it by using Drupal as a portal to access the openEMR database for viewing(leave the clinical data entry to the openEMR side) and community building.

Now I'm using openEMR only as an example, this same process can be attempted with any open source project.

I think it is doable - given that someone has this "itch to scratch" and I'm sure that developers would contribute.

- jim

zeezhao’s picture

zeezhao commented

Hi. Please do you know if this was ever progressed i.e. integrate openemr with drupal or a new drupal ehr

mat.taylor’s picture

mat.taylor commented

I was planning to build something similar using CivicCRM to to approximate EHR's? CivicCRM offers quite sophisticated grouping and profile record ustomisation or both 'admins' (doctors), 'users' (health workers) and 'contacts' (patients) as well as powerfull API and good import/export options for contact records.

Any reasons why this would not work?

dado’s picture

dado commented

mat,
I have not played w/ civicrm & not sure of the details you propose but sounds reasonable on face. Maybe the next integration for civicrm should then be with OpenEMR or other PHP based open source EMR and/or practice management system.

I have been thinking more about this. A vanilla blog site could add a bit of value to many practices. doctors do have messages they'd like to communicate to their patients at large. So setting up a doctor's site as just a blogging site might be helpful. Going beyond that to forums- some privacy issues but you could probably add more value w/ forums.

Beyond that to communicating w/ individual patients. You begin to need some more advanced functionality ("ehealth") but by no means exotic.
dado

alldirt’s picture

alldirt commented

http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-health