What is the best resource and structure to follow with respect to contributing this? We would generally want to provide something similar/based on the sample application included in the download. Current support is still via the rxscripts code I wrote if I am not mistaken? Any pointers to information online or a person would be great thanks.
Each separate site would want there own key. The API is pretty straightforward however things get a little more complicated in how interactions/allergies and patient information sheets and labels are delivered. As I said we are happy to contribute a form, if someone else should do it that is fine too.
Can someone summarize what the current medications setup in OpenEMR is today?
David, thanks for the offer. I’m sure this will generate some interest. What’s the licensing of the API and your proposed medications form for OpenEMR? Obviously we want everything to be GPL-compatible.
I haven’t looked at the medications lookup code recently, but I believe it was screen-scraping the rxlist.com site. The module library/classes/RXList.class.php would be of interest in understanding that. Prescribing has not greatly changed in recent years, though there is now support for in-house drug inventory, dispensation and sales as well as the necessary support for NDC codes in insurance claims.
Is there a place to look at far as how we should construct this, should we just rip and replace the RX-List thing? Should we use our coding conventions, etc. We want to play nice with others.
The licensing on the code to access the API’s can be contributed under whatever license you prefer, GPL is our default. The data itself falls under the service license which you approve when you first enable your key (this is described in the docs I linked to). Different data will have different terms but generally speaking you can do whatever you like with the data, our interests in the license are in waiving liability for how you use it and for any errors that may be present.
It gets complicated though, for example with an e-prescribing history (3rd party RX history) which isn’t yet part of the public beta but will be soon you are not permitted to use that for anything other than that patients treatment (no aggregate reporting, no anonymized disctribution). That is a limit of the upstream providers.
In most cases data comes from the government so it is available under public domain but when a commercial/NPO provider is involved we have to live with their terms.
We aren’t trying to force this on anyone but just needed to solve the problem for our own project and decided to do so in a way that is portable. I would hate to see 7 OS projects maintaining drug database, trust me when I say it is a lot of work.
It should be noted to that the CHMED API is just one, we have several other in the cooker for working with pubmed data, clinical trial data and automated eligibility, ghealth.