The default search interface (UI and functionality) provided by OpenEMR
is working good. But, for last few days we are developing an advance search UI
which can be used from an OpenEMR installed site via web-service (REST-API).
Here I am asking for you suggestion and opinion about this web service for “ADVANCE SEARCH”.
Main advantage of the Advance Search UI is that it searches with each key-press making the search experiance much like google search.
Some examples will give more light on this issue:-
Example-1: To search patients where name has ‘jacob’ and date-of-birth is 1977 you need to type
name=jacob dob=1977
Example-2: To search patients where first name has ‘john’ and last name has ‘smith’ you need to type
fname=john lname=smith
Example-3: To search patients where email is ‘john@gmail.com’ and phone number is ‘98765’ you need to type email=john@gmail.com phone=98765
The functionality you demo already exists as part of OpenEMR developed by Rod, funded by Dr. Eschelbacher on the finder screen. (Patient Client/Patient in the left nav.) Your prefix method allows for using some additional search parameters (like email address), but I don’t think that’s a particularly useful search criteria.
Agree with Kevin. Instead of ‘Advanced Search’, why not make the normal search do advanced stuff like mySQL full text search and automatic ranking. In the office no one has time to type phone=… As it is they are annoyed that after entering number if they forget to press ID link, emr returns 0 matches when the search term is (to them) clearly an ID.
Two main things I want to point out here about how “Advanced search” differs from “Default OpenEMR search”
We use “Sphinx search” instead of traditional “MySQL Full Text Search”.
We provide search result “on-keypress” instead of “on-click” event.
For a small chunk of patient record both ‘MySQL Full Text Search’ and ‘Sphinx search’ will perform well.
But as the size of database increases ‘Sphinx search’ is more preferable over ‘MySQL Full Text Search’.
For detail you can see http://sphinxsearch.com/blog/2013/06/26/from-mysql-fulltext-search-to-sphinx/
About the ‘on-click’ vs ‘on-keypress’ issue, I think most people will prefer ‘on-keypress’ as you can get the search result just typing out your search text.
Finally, considering the issue pointed out by MD “no one has time to type phone=…”, we can provide an query-builder-form popup which will create the ‘SEARCH TEXT’ for “Advanced search”.