Import

armzak wrote on Saturday, July 11, 2009:

What is the best way to import a patient list from an excel spreadsheet?

cfapress wrote on Thursday, July 23, 2009:

You will need to create a custom import script. I’m pretty sure others have done this with OpenEMR. Have you searched the forums for “import patient” ?

Jason

blankev wrote on Thursday, July 23, 2009:

Dear ArmZAK,

If you have a spreadsheet with all patients you can manipulate this list into a correct CSV comma separated file.

What I did, is make with the Version OpenEMR to be used about three or four patients with as much filled fields as possible and throught phpMyAdmin export the table with the correct fields as a CSV file. Use this file to make your original patient list compatible with the output CSV file of the three patients. Import this compatible CSV file through phpMyAdmin of OpenEMR database button/menu choice.

There can be a caveat in Dates and NULL fields (Out of memory a text based field will do best for dates), but keep on trying with different settings for the format in the spreadsheet and eventually you will have your CSV file imported. I did it with 25.000 patient names and it worked. If I new before hand how to do it, it would have taken me half an our in stead of three days.

But any time you are confronted with an import mistake, don’t forget to DROP the table, because you want a clean import for the Database. Also you have to drop the table patients of the three imaginary patients. DO NOT DELETE or DROP THE WHOLE DATABASE only the relevant single table!!!!!!!!

Pimm

blankev wrote on Tuesday, July 28, 2009:

N.B:

In addition I need to mention that you should NOT:… DROP … a table, since than it is gone for always, till reinstalled. Only EMPTY a table. Than import from scratch. Could also use the easier SQL export/import but than you have to get your Excel-sheet into the SQL file first and that needs a bit more copy paste effort

Pimm