this is just a message to tell the group about the work that Visolve is doing for a client of ours. We are hosting OpenEMR www.jse.net for a physician in Norfolk, VA. Dr East wanted real time lab results to populate in the patients chart. I had shared with him that he can get the results in an efax and simply place the pdf in the patients chart.
The Dr. wanted the populated automatically directly from the lab into the patients chart with out the extra step of the pdf. This is where Visolve comes into the picture. The doctor also wanted to be able to order labs through the EMR program. Visolve has setup with the hospital lab the software necessary to connect our datacenter to the labs datacenter and transmite patients lab results to our instance of OpenEMR. Now the doctor is able to receive real time results as they are transmited by the lab in HL7 format and parsed into the patients record.
The next step is to make this a two way connection as to the doctor being able to order labs from within the EMR program and not have to gen any paper for the patient. The labs will be ordered and the patient just goes to the lab and sign in.
This has been a wonderful experience working with Visolve and their team of programmers. This has been a smooth transition to a live working application for Dr. East. The communications were great! I could not ask for a better team of people to have completed this project.
This is inspiring!
The future has arrived! our results are posted online and then each doctor has to log in with a unique id to access them. i guess i’ll continue using the pdf method!
How do the lab vendors e.g. quest, labcorb, etc respond to requests for interface assistance? They were highly motivated at my last practice and we were only a two person shop, but it was not a big deal to get them to actually PAY the software company (Allscripts in this case) to install and maintain the interface…
The answers to some of the questions is as follows:
The lab company is Sentara Laboratory. The interface partner for the lab information is 4Medica. Sentara Laboratory paid for the setup. Dr. East is a cariologiest. He is a single doctor practice right now.
4Medica was very receptive to the OpenEMR. They did not voice any aprehensions to using the application. They were excited to see a new application come onboard along with all the Allscripts and other vendors they connect with.
I missed a question and the answer is this is a direct connection to the lab system over a VPN. The labs are pushed to the intermediate server where the Mirth is installed to parse the data then transfer it to the EMR instance.
Thanks for the info. Yeah I was wondering if an intermediate server was involved, and whether it wouldn’t be practical to do the HL7 parsing in OpenEMR instead (or perhaps that is more of a business issue than technical?).