markleeds wrote on Saturday, April 23, 2005:
I think that others have suggested or are working on something similar to this, but this is my thoughts about it.
A feature that is mentioned in medical informatics articles often is ‘Data Mining’, which is known as a feature that separates the high priced, high end EMR (EHR) software from the low end.
I believe that this just means being able to do custom queries to get useful data out of the relational database.
I imagine this being implemented as a form based feature that you would select from the top main menu and get a list of forms, each setup for various types of queries. The forms would exist in a separate forms folder and adding them would be similar to the encounter forms, but easier, because no changes to the database would be required. Each could be a single .php file.
This would allow a user to see, for example, a list of patient records of everyone who is prescribed Vioxx so they can be called to stop it.
Research could be done for pharmaceutical companies which opens up the possibility for outside funding to get OpenEMR in more primary care offices where the perception is that going paperless is too expensive.
If I am just repeating an already proposed idea, sorry. Maybe just using the ‘Data Mining’ title for the feature will get the attention of potential users.
By the way, I have been playing around with the cvs features on this site, browsing the diffs and downloading the latest openemr module. It is really unbelievably cool. A person could really learn a lot this way. Great idea bringing OpenEMR here.
Mark