Customisation: Producing and importing a list of medications specific to my country

Day-to-Day Users
1

Good day,
I am a single practitioner from South Africa. I want to use my government’s published list of medications to write prescriptions through OpenEMR. I am running OpenEMR 7.0.2 on Linux Mint.
The list can be found here: https://www.health.gov.za/nhi-pee/
It is an unwieldy excel file, but I can probably extract the data I need (mainly generic and trade names, dosage and formulation)
What are the steps I can take to add this to the native prescription tool in OpenEMR?
At the moment I go from my patient dashboard → Prescriptions → edit → add. Then I add the medications one by one. Is this the standard work-flow for scripts?
(My biggest issue with this is that the prescriptions are not tied to a specific encounter, but that is not a major issue.)

My level of competence: I am willing to tinker in the terminal, edit files and dig in the filesystem, but by no means competent in php or mysql. (Although I did now enrol in a Udemy course to learn more)

Many thanks for your attention
Jan

2

Hello, normally, what I do (I’m from Argentina), is to install the RXCUI codes (Admin/Coding/Native Data Load, you must download them). Those drug codes are written in the codes table, with code_type=109, then I delete those codes: DELETE FROM codes WHERE code_type = 109. Then I load my spreadsheet in the codes table, only the necessary columns, you must add a column that in all rows has the code 109. If you have any problems, let me know.
Regards.
Luis

2 Likes
3

Hello Jan,

I can help you import medications that you have in excel.

Lets connect dan@valcz.com

1 Like
4

Thanks for the offer to help. Just curious, why not over the forum?

5

OK. I’m going to have to learn a bit of mysql it seems. I will try and let you know.

1 Like
6

You can use some free manager like HeidiSQL, DBeaver-CE or PhpMyAdmin

7

I have a project I built for another country that I can find out if I can distribute back to the project. It is a drug import mapping system. You can build custom mappers, but there is a csv mapper format built that your excel file could probably export to. It will populate the drugs table and then you can write prescriptions against the ‘default’ drugs database.

I can ask and circle back with you next week if its something I can share. We’ve been rushing through several projects so I believe ultimately they would want to share, but just a matter of priority and timing and removing the the country specific mapping files that use a custom XML format.

1 Like