Proposal for reorganized menu in new tab based interface for version 5.0

OpenEMR Development
#1

mdsupport wrote on Monday, December 12, 2016:

Soliciting comments on proposed changes to menu layout:

Overall objective is 6-8 top menus - at most 2 levels deep and each with 6-8 sub-menus and links. For starters, here are basic changes:

Splits Patient/Encounter into two top menus
Splits links under Modules, Inventory, Procedures and Popups to existing top menus
Adds multiple sub-menus under Administration

In the next phase, tab specific menu links would also be made available from a single floating button.

Brady has started an online demo for the proposed changes here:
http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Development_Demo#192.168.1.134

Can we integrate bootstrap menu bar in OpenEMR5?
#2

bradymiller wrote on Sunday, December 18, 2016:

btw, above work by MD Support can be found on following PR:

#3

medfetch wrote on Tuesday, December 20, 2016:

I think it is time to design the menus in such a way that they appeal to the user. From a usability and an aesthetic perspective, it is important that a fresh install greets the new user with a familiar, role-based interface. Imagine a menu so intuitive that a role-based user can just get to work using openEMR. A new user should be able to immediately understand the menu - that is not the case presently. The learning curve is quite steep partly because of the menu architecture. Changing this will make openEMR more attractive to practices looking for a new EMR solution. The acl system is too dense to configure for mere mortals, yet the menu system needs a way to be easily configurable through the browser, with acl as the back bone. While you are working on building the blocks to make it configurable, I would like to offer some role-based menu suggestions.

We currently have 4 menus/roles in use:

  1. Answering Service
  2. Front Desk
  3. Clinical Staff
  4. Administration (original openEMR left nav-> tabs menu)

Each role has certain work flows and the menu is specific to those needs, limiting the rest visually in the foreground (browser) and in the background via acl (when the user was created). The jpg attached is what our answering service (role 1.) sees when they take a call or book an appointment.

Brady has been kind enough to lend a demo server:
http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Development_Demo#192.168.1.133
Select Settings on the top right (under the Username) and note the setting: Tabs Menu Style. Try a few of the options to get a flavor of examples of role-based menus. Remember this is a shared server so another user also logged in as admin/pass can change your settings/interface… Consider adding a unique user to test it out.

N.B. This is just an example of the concept to promote discussion.

#4

juggernautsei wrote on Monday, December 26, 2016:

I was trying this today and the layout did not change according to the image shown.

#5

medfetch wrote on Thursday, December 29, 2016:

In the demo there are some issues with refreshing the page after changes are made. I believe it has to do with multi-site setup but if you relogin after changes the new menu items based on roles will appear. This is a concept for role-based menus, not production code, so I apologize for not knowing how to make the changes seamless. The menu builder (still needed) will surely address these issues. I was hoping more people could try it to build a consensus as to what should go into each role-based menu. If the demo is not working that will be the first step… If relogin does not work, please let me know again. PS. It works in Firefox for me.

#6

robertovasquez wrote on Thursday, December 29, 2016:

MD supoort Menu design look a lot better that the original design. Good job

#7

bradymiller wrote on Friday, December 30, 2016:

Hi,

Very awesome to see progress on this front, which will be critical improvements.

To provide some clarification here, note there are 2 demos in this thread that focus on 2 different aspects.

Demo 1 is by MD Support where the goal is to improve the “default” menu:
http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Development_Demo#192.168.1.134
(see MD Support’s post for details)

Demo 2 is by Ray to bring in the feature of role based menus:
http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Development_Demo#192.168.1.133
(see Ray’s posts above for details)
(note that the role based settting can be done in the Globals and/or User Preferences; also need to logout/login whenever change the settings)

Would be very helpful to get input on the following:

  1. Default menu links/organization in MD Support’s demo
  2. Role based menu links/organization in Ray’s demo

thanks,
-brady
OpenEMR

#8

juggernautsei wrote on Monday, January 02, 2017:

The role based menu doesn’t work out the right way.

Created a biller login and gave the accounting role. However when loggin and and trying to go to user preferences, That is not a menu item that shows to everyone. Since the preferences are under the Misc it would be hard to set.

It would be nice to be able to set the menu role when creating the user. That way the admin can decide what menu the staff is going to see before they log in and the user doesn’t have access to change their menu setting.

#9

medfetch wrote on Thursday, January 05, 2017:

Hi Sherwin,

First I hope we agree that the current “default” menu is an eyesore. It makes for a steep learning curve for users. They have to learn what to ignore, and ignore it forever instead of giving them what they need up front.

I haven’t got around to the Billing/Back Office Menu yet. It is definitely a required role-based menu. I wanted to first sit down with the billing company I use and go through their work-flows to create something logical. Life is short and time is a commodity, but I will look to do this next week.

What did you think of the role-based menus that are present? To a new comer opening openEMR for the first time, they make sense compared to the current “default” menu. They can get to work quite quickly with a lot less instruction. Should we add some other menu items to these roles?

The demo today allows any user to change their menu as a user-preference. ACL restricts what they can actually do based on the type of priviledges they were assigned. This is just for show for the demo.

Part of the role-based menu concept is that the menus will be customizable at the admin level - what you want on a given menu is all that’s the user can see. It would not be adjustable as a user preference unless you are priviledged. This should really only be done by someone who knows openEMR and for most people, this would be another really good reason to pay for support. What I propose, while this customizable menu is being built, is to consider deploying these pre-cast (essentially immutable) role-based menus in the interim, if you want. You can always feed up the default menu…

Since there are two concepts in this thread, the role-based menu and the new default menu, I’ll start a new thread and post pics of the menus for those who want to see them that way rather than the demo.

Ray

#10

Hi,

Time to bump the priority of this project up. Suggest focusing on a Minimal Viable Product that has several standard json menus in addition to a place where can store custom json menus; and the menu is selected for each User in the Admin->Users gui(and could use a list_options mechanism to map standard/custom:filename in option_id to the title of the menu). The Standard menus could consist of Original, New, etc (with New and the others being based on Ray’s menu structures in the demo).

Thoughts? Anybody interested in doing this?

-brady
OpenEMR

#11

probably not worthy but agree it’s a priority to build on what Ray and mdsupport have presented so far, thanks Brady

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#12

Need to review the work mdsupport and Ray put on this, but think it’d be easy enough to configure the menu to be user/group specific. Will investigate

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