I’ve been gradually trying to educate myself about OpenEMR, and so far am quite impressed. It is a significant open source accomplishment.
However, I’m puzzled by one apparent omission. Every EMR I’ve used has something like an “inbox” for each user. New lab results, other items requiring review, and messages from other users are sent to it. OpenEMR has a messaging component, but I have so far been unable to understand how a new lab result, for example, would be queued for review by a physician.
For that matter, what facilities are available for interfacing with other systems that might produce such results? It seems that these might be filed as “documents” (if they were produced as pdfs, for example), but what kind of interface could be used to inject the pdfs into OpenEMR? Also, pdfs would work pretty well for pathology or radiology reports, but something like a hematology or chemistry report should be imported as discrete, structured, data, so that a change in values over time could be plotted, for example. Of course, it would be possible to use something like MirthConnect to directly modify the SQL database, but this doesn’t seem desirable.
suggests that an interface with LabCorp is available. It indicates that OpenEMR can be configured to communicate with LabCorp at this address: https://labcorp.openemrsupport.com:29443/len/api. I’d be interested to know how this interface works. Evidently LabCorp offers and OpenEMR consumes some sort of web service - my guess is that HL7 messages are perhaps being sent via SOAP, but this would be a somewhat unusual way to arrange a laboratory interface. Is there documentation of the message formats somewhere? Is there any information as to how this “Laboratory Exchange Network” works? If another lab wanted to use the same mechanism, how would it go about it? I’d hate to have to figure it out by reading the code!
The lab exchange process, poles the Medical Information Integration, LLC lab exchange server (LEN) for results that match a LabCorp supplied token. The HL7 messages coming from LabCorp to the LEN (a Mirth Server) are translated into XML data packets which are processed into the OpenEMR database.
This allows us to add backend translators to the LEN for different labs and have OpenEMR receive the same data feed. Soltas and Quest interfaces are in progress using this LEN.