I’m a dermatologist interested in developing some new forms that would be useful for my specialty. The forms will be open-sourced, if they can be completed. I’m quite new to OpenEMR (and unfortunately also PHP and javascript, though I’ve done a lot of programming in other languages), so may have a few questions. The first one is: There are quite a few forms under openemr/contrib/forms, but only some of these are available for activation under Admiistration | Other | Forms. What determines which forms show up here?
Thanks very much in advance,
Matthew Fleming, MD
Fleming Dermatopathology
Milwaukee, WI
There are many ways to develop your forms. The forms in contrib/ are not by default available for import, to make one of them available for import, it must be moved to the interface/forms directory.
Forms may be implemented either in PHP, in PHP + smarty templating, in PHP + smarty + the image based form API, by use of the layout editor, OR by use of the XML Form Generator. I would recommend assaying these options before picking an implementation method, as each have their plusses and minuses.
Thanks. According to the docs, smarty tempting is deprecated, but the others might be useful.
Actually, what I’m most interested in is adding some photoarchiving functionality. I could be wrong, but it appears that OpenEMR allows a single photograph to be stored with the patient demographics, but does not allow photos to be included with encounters. This is important functionality for dermatology (it is, for example, one of the features required by CCHIT for certification as a derm-specific EMR, along with related features such as the ability to display two photos side-by-side). This would seem to require PHP + javascript. I’d also like to add the ability to annotate body surface diagrams (another CCHIT requirement), tho for this the image based form API might be quite useful. These are the first priorities.
The smarty rule / guideline really only applies to new code development, not to using the existing forms creation tools.
As to attaching pictures/documents to encounters, I believe I saw someone posted about that, but I don’t recall how you activate it, it’s not listed in the Globals as a feature.
Manually it’s not hard to just use the data of service in the filename and description of the photo and place it in an Document Catg called “Encounter Images” or something. (not ideal, but do-able)
A JQuery photo gallery add-on would do the side by side in a heartbeat.
As a Plastic Surgeon, I am also interested in managing photos in OpenEMR. We also deal with X-rays on a regular basis, so my immediate plan is to set up a PACS server on one of our office computers, independent of OpenEMR. I have downloaded, but not yet installed, an app from O3 Consortium that allows uploading of photos to a PACS server. The main stumbling block now is that I can’t find a DICOM viewer that runs on an Android tablet that connects over a network to a PACS server. I use Aeskulap on my desktop system, and it works very well.
As I said, all this will be taking place outside of OpenEMR itself. There was a thread here some time ago about incorporating a DICOM viewer into OpenEMR, but I don’t know if any further work is being done.
Hello Matthew, I am curious if you ever got your forms completed or if you are still seeking help in designing them? If you did develop them, are they available to the community now?
Thanks for the suggestion FSGL! I am preparing to present OpenEMR to a dermatologist and was looking for something I could demo for him. Since I already have experience building custom forms it should be a piece of cake to implement one from the search results you provided. Cheers mate!