stoneystone2 wrote on Saturday, October 04, 2008:
Has anyone tried or had success with importing patient data from proprietary EMR software?
My office is interested in OpenEMR, but we now have ALL of our patient information in an expensive and complicated system.
If anyone has experience with this, I would love to hear about it.
rpl121 wrote on Saturday, October 04, 2008:
I had the same challenge in my switchover about seven weeks ago. My old program with 15-1/2 years of accumulated information, was all locked up. I tried these approaches:
I tried to find an ODBC driver for the database files. I had no luck because of the oddball database used and because the developer would not release the necessary secret password.
I found that I could create a "generic text printer" and then print to file through the program. This did require a port redirecting utility or something like that, but it worked. Then I was able to use the Linux programs sed or awk to pull out exactly what text I wanted where. While this worked, I did not find it a useful approach.
I was able to display a summary of immunizations and a summary of the past history and review of systems on the old program. Then, I found I could cut and paste these into Word Pad and save them with appropriate names. Then I attached these text documents to the appropriate patient record in OpenEMR. From that location, I could cut and paste into OpenEMR notes.
Whenever I got a letter, lab report or saw a patient, I entered the name, sex, birth date and assigned physician manually. Immediately, I cut and pasted the immunization record and PH/ROS as above.
When I actually saw the patient, I scanned the printout of the most recent OV and the most recent H&P, along with pertinent old lab reports etc. My guideline was to put in what I felt I needed to do a good job taking care of the patient without referring to the old record.
At the time of the encounter, I put in medications, problems, allergies and treatments. (I renamed "dental issues" as "treatments." I also made appropriate entries into the "Risk Factors" and "Tests" sections of "history." I found it helpful to customize the list of "Risk Factors" and "Tests" to include what is important in family medicine.
Doing all this takes about 20-30 minutes of my time per patient. So far I am completely caught up, mostly because my practice is not extremely busy. If I fall behind, I plan to enter only the basic information and then make a note of what additional information is necessary in the "user defined" fields of demographics. For example, I could put "Scan records" in the field. Later, one can go to the MySQL command line and do an SQL command to list all patients which something in this field, and you can use this as a "to do list."
Another thing I did was talk to the local clinical laboratory. They gave us a Windows executable that downloads lab reports in *.pdf or HL7 formats. I found that I can attach the lab reports in document form. I can’t get the HL7 files to do anything useful at this point.
During the last sever weeks or so I have been going home a bit more tired than usual, but as time goes by, the proportion of patients new to OpenEMR decreases and it gets easier.
Ronald Leemhuis MD