Hey
im an administrator trainee at a school in norway. we have a course for students to become foot-therapists here, i have installed openEMR onto a 2008 windows server.
And made everything ready to deploy this.
But I recently discovered that there is a standard for documenting feet health journals, it includes drawing a foot or have a image of a patients foot, and drawing/placing certain symbols on parts of the foot these symbols have meaning as for example:a circle with cross over on a nail means that the nail is thicker than normal and this could cause problems for the patient.
So im trying to find an easy way of creating this, at the moment im looking for a solution in flash a drag and drop function with one standard image of a foot, and all the icons on the side so you can draw them onto the image, and eventually save the image as a jpg file under documentation however im no expert programmer so before i start trying to patch this together. anyone have any tips?
Here is an idea that would not require any programming and could be used with a standard Windows installation.
1) Find or create a standard foot image. You could ‘borrow’ something like this:
2) Put the image on each workstation and make it read-only.
3) Each therapist would be able to open up the image in MS Paint, make edits, and save the modified image with a new file name.
4) Go into the patient’s record in OpenEMR and click on Documents. Here, the therapist can upload the modified foot image to the patient’s record.
It’s a very rudimentary technique but might offer you a quick solution with existing software. There is just training required and perhaps a single instruction sheet for the users to refer to.
Not a bad idea i will use this as a temporary solution, but the thing is if i can develop a proper module for OpenEMR with a flash solution or something like that imbedded in OpenEMR. it will probably be used in all the feet-study/clinic practises atleast in my part of norway, since the other alternatives are extremely expensive with yearly fees on upgrading and course for employees not mention the license price for these programs.
If you go forward with the Flash solution I recommend you create a new Encounter Form. There are many examples in the folder <oemr>/contrib/forms from which you can base your development.
If you require tighter integration with a patient’s record then you might end up with a solution that will not be able to upgrade when a new OpenEMR version becomes available. I’ve always found developing with this group to be an interesting exercise in “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”.
I mean to say that every time I develop new features I first consider my Agency and then consider the OpenEMR community. I ask myself if the new development is something that only my Agency will use? If so, how I can build it so that we can still upgrade OpenEMR later without breaking my code.