Customizing patient record fields and additional forms

Management and Administration
#1

Hi,

We are considering OpenEMR to replace our current old Electronic Medical System. So far, I have been playing around with the OpenEMR demo at OpenEMR Demo.

Being a newbie at OpenEMR, I have some questions that I wish to get some guidance from the community that will hopefully speed up our learnings.

  1. I saw various tabs under the Patient Dashboard > Demographics. I presume I can remove some of these tabs and add new tabs that match our requirements?

  2. There are a lot of data fields under Patient Dashboard > Demographics. Are these fields customizable?

  3. I saw many forms at the right column of Patient Dashboard, i.e. allergies, medical problems, medications, etc. How do I customize these forms, i.e. add / remove fields in these forms?

  4. In our hospital, we have additional forms that our doctors need to complete for all patients, such as

  • Health Screening and Assessment: A set of health screening / diagnosis questionnaire that our doctors need to complete on patients first visit.
  • Continuation Form: A set of questionnaire that our doctors need to complete when following up / clerking an existing patient.
  • Phone Review: A short note that records the patient condition when our doctors to call to review a patient medical condition.

What would be the best place to implement these forms?

  1. If there are certain modules that we don’t need, i.e. appointments, calendar, dispensary, payment processing, How do we disable and hide them from the user interface?

I know these are a lot of questions. If it is too time consuming to answer, appreciate if you could point me to the right link with the relevant resources so that I can read further.

Thank you in advance.

Angela

#2

TLDR; anything you need OpenEMR to do, you can mostly do yourself. But with the help of a developer, your limits are endless (within reason).

The main thing to understand is that everything about OpenEMR is customizable. The answer to 1,2,3 is yes. You can customize and modify these fields in Administration → Layouts.

Here is an example using the community (unedited) OpenEMR 610, displaying our infamous test patient Mr. Binder:

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Since I wanted to add/remove tabs for a pediatric clinic, I went to Administration → Forms → Layouts. Then I selected “Demographics”. I made my edits that were necessary for my unique situation:

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And I added tabs and fields that met the business needs of a pediatric hospital.

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Every clinic has their own needs so we added fields that were consistent with our needs, requirements, and workflow.

As far as custom forms, here is an example of one of my clients needing to fill out a physical exam needed for preschool students. This is a form that was created by a developer (me)

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So we could fill out the following printout form, which is required for preschool admission. Some offices fill this out by hand, but the custom work allows for information to be pulled from the EMR to auto-populate the printout.

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The simplest way to do it, but maybe not the most ideal is to create an LBF. If you work with a developer who understands UI and workflow, it will be more expensive but time-saving in the long run. I’m happy to discuss more with you if you would like.

1 Like
#3

Hi Daniel,

Thank you for your reply.

I would like to explore how you could help us. May I know what’s the best way to contact you?