Together with some other people here in the Netherlands we are starting a new visualization around the open emr database which suits our basic needs. The visualization provided by openEMR is too broad for our target audience.
While trying to understand your design choices i’m somewhat confused by the database design. And while reading the database description in the wiki section I see I’m not alone.
- Therefore I would like to ask… Are there plans for cleaning up the database structure in the near future?
- Is there a design choice why the patient address data is stored twice? Once in patient_data and once again in insurance_data?
For those of you who are interested in the first glimps of the project… I’ve added a screenshot of a patient profile view.
Thanks for your time!
Regards,
Richard.
P.s. for questions regarding the project, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ll be glad to answer your questions.
OEMR, the custodial agent for OpenEMR is planning (and has been for a while) to make version 5 be the target for a major revamp of the underlying database. This is a major undertaking.
As to ‘design’ reasons for things, I think it would be a mistake to think the the current database was ‘designed’ it was organically grown with features as needed.
There is a large gap in the way insurance and responsible party and other billing accounting information is handled, I wrote a very broad document about that which can be found on the wiki:
Thanks for your reply. The Gap_review document gives me some more insight on how things should work regarding the insurance bit of the application.
Regarding the major revamp of the database, is there any documentation on that available already?
If not, could it be an idea to start working on that. I on my side am willing to put some effort into that, but i’m not completely confident I know the entire system well enough to pull this off on my own. Is it an idea to start working on a draft (beginning with the basics i need in my project) and work from there?
At this point nothing formal has happened. Just conversation and thoughts. There are several folks that want to work in this, so starting a conversation here about it would be good. And a wiki page for artifacts, examples etc.
-Tony