is ther any place or any activity goning on, in subject related information on connections (in Windows XP) to interchange data between openEMR and Quickbooks 2004 Pro, with the help of the WBC, provided as freeware by Inuit Quickbooks2004Pro?
I would be grateful if ANYBODY could give me some hints to find more info on implementation. I read all QUickbooks provided information and THEY say it is easy, but I am still overwhelmed with questions related to QWC.
I suspect that this is possible with some caveats:
1) You’ll probably have to either do it yourself or fund having it done; there’s significant inertia in OpenEMR towards SQL-Ledger rather than QuickBooks so interest is probably low.
2) It’s probably going to live “beside” OpenEMR rather than being part of it (much like SQL-Ledger or FreeB).
3) You’re going to need to do quite a bit of planning in advance - exactly what information do you want? Where is it available in OpenEMR (or the database)? Where is it going in QuickBooks? etc.
For the curious, QuickBooks Web Connector runs on a system running QuickBooks and connects out to systems providing XML-formatted information to it (Ahh, XML and SOAP!). It does not accept inbound connections, it’s strictly pull-based.
I took a quick look and it seems to be rather complicated and will need tp dp another special study. So for the time being no Quickbooks<=>OpenEmr connection for me. But I bookmarked the page for future reference. Enough study material to get EMR running for our Clinic.
Thinking about it, you could probably build something that pulled the information you needed out of the database. You’d need to track independently what transactions in the OpenEMR database had already been processed, but that’s pretty standard for this kind of thing. You’d be somewhat tied to specific versions of OpenEMR, but the database structure doesn’t seem to change particularly fast so compatibility would not be a likely problem for years to come.
Depending on the efficiency of your querying & processing of data on the OpenEMR server side, you might want something that would query the DB in real time when QuickBooks connected to it or you might want something that ran only at scheduled times (possibly just overnight) to do your data extraction with a QB interface that returned not-previously-transmitted extracted data when queried. If the QuickBooks side supports some form of transaction ID then you might be able to assign in your data extraction application and get it back from QuickBooks (much like NNTP message numbering).
Having asynchronous data extraction could also be good for future scaling - what works quickly on a test DB with 200 patients and 400 office visits may not be so quick on a live DB with 10,000 patients and 100,000 visits.