FHIR SDOH Referral Workflow IG

OpenEMR Development
1

We organize outpatient Medicaid mental health care clinics in Colorado. Colorado is pressing organizations to implement ‘closed loop’ referral at patient contact points follow SDOH (PRAPARE) assessments.

I read the 2022 implementation in openEMR of a SDOH assessment, so that looks good. I’ll see about creating a PRAPARE routine for that assessment.

The bigger part is implementing the referral workflow documented here.
https://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/fhir-sdoh-clinicalcare/referral_workflow.html

Since we’re just getting started, wondering if other developers are working on this and what directions you’re taking.

Our clinics are solo and small and have no IT budget so we want a free front-end that allows

  1. patient list
  2. identifying their medical provider and creating 2-way messaging for messages and documents
  3. search the referral database for appropriate referrals in response to PREPARE answers.
  4. get client consent and manage consent documents
  5. refer the client to the target referral agency along with patient info if appropriate
  6. also receive referrals from sources (we’d be the referral target) and return lists of available providers based on search criteria
  7. see updates in the patient list about if the target referral agency responded to the referral (Close loop referral)

Any quick thoughts about the appropriateness of using openEMR as the front end /FHIR server for this would be appreciated.

2

@Andrew_Rose
Thanks for posting. It will be a huge uphill battle to get volunteers for this kind of major task.
With that said, I applaud what your group is trying to do.
If I can help try to answer any questions. I will do what I can.
The thing that I am working on is a universal or general-purpose app that will work with any OpenEMR installation. We have worked out most of the details of the initial communication between OpenEMR and the app. I have learned that we needed to stand up an intermediate server to handle that communication. We are at the point of getting the client_id and secret from the OpenEMR server so that the app can start pulling data from the OpenEMR instance.

3

No one is currently working on the SDOH Referral profile right now. We will be adding some SDOH elements as part of our USCDI V3 upgrades for our US ONC (Office of National Coordinator) certification. If this is critical for you and you are able to secure budget we can get people to assist with this. Otherwise it might take a while to do this on volunteer basis

You can definitely use OpenEMR for this, but much of the work would need to be fleshed out. We’ve done some experimental work with questionnaires, tasks, service requests, but its currently not in the core product. I can provide some guidance but right now a lot of my focus is on our ONC certification efforts with FHIR with upgrading USCDI V3 and FHIR 6.