Hi all,
I suppose we need a starting point. For OpenEMR’s purpose, i’d like to focus on the clinical(telemedicine) namely, communications.
Currently the only feature that addresses this is in our portals Secure Chat. This feature was written with allowing patient and care teams or providers to securely message. It includes ability to send images whether video or image formats. However, with the recent proliferation of video(including chat feature) tools, portal chat is somewhat passe.
So, i’d say video conference would be our best bet to get a telemedicine feature started. To this end we’d need to find the best video tools to fit with a hipaa compliant implementation of video along with building infrastructure into OpenEMR to support. These two requirements can happen in tandem.
For infrastructure the main areas needing addressed are:
- Integrate video sessions with Appointments for scheduling and billing.
- Integrate with encounters because, well how else do we document.
- Integrate with portal however, should still have ability to conference from other means. Mobile etc.
For video streaming tools, currently we have Nodejs, PHP and Javascript that can support.
My current thinking is to have our own streaming server while trying to keep as much as we can within OpenEMRs domain. I’ve setup a node server in the past using https://webrtc.org/ but, by all means research as I haven’t looked in awhile.
Important is to keep Hipaa forefront.
Suggestions?