Some questions

Management and Administration
#1

Hi,

After successfully having set up OpenEMR on a Raspberry Pi with your help (thanks!) for our small Peruvian audiology clinic, I have some more general questions not directly related. Not 100% sure if this is the best sub forum though.

We are a NGO and received a while ago some funding for tech development to serve remote and under-served world corners better. While the general idea what we want to develop was long debated, it will be an Android app with offline functionality (not all places we work in have reliable internet). The question came up if to include in this app a basic patient management tool.

As I am personally (which means not everyone involved 100% agrees with me) very much pro-open source and against inventing the wheel new, I’d love to have the possibility to at least sync this offline patient database with an existing open source solution, be it OpenEMR or something else. Even though it is still not decided if this part would be included or not, or in a later stage, here my questions:

  • HIPAA (or PHIPA in Ontario/Canada) compliance: As far as I understand it, OpenEMR would comply as long as it is set up and used properly, is this correct? While we not work in the US, we see more countries coming up with similar laws, often using HIPAA as a model. Are/were there any audits about HIPAA compliance, or does this too much depend on the individual setup? I know one developing partner we use for other projects (closed source unfortunately) get regular PHIPA audits. As I am not an expert in this field, I am not sure what the ONC certification means.

  • Is there an API or an other way a mobile app could sync with an OpenEMR implementation? I found something here: https://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/OpenEMR_API, but wonder what the progress on this is and how functional it is for the described project?

  • If OpenEMR is for whatever reason not the best solution for this, do you know a better (open-source) solution? I haven’t found any, only commercial EMRs with mobile apps.

Of course this wouldn’t be implemented by me (I have programming experience, but from the other side of the programming world, neither server nor database applications), we would work with a developing partner.

Would be nice to get some feedback and ideas which I can use to steer the boat a bit towards open-source!

Thanks!

#2

hi @anton, yes, it’s probably easier to say that OpenEMR is HIPAA eligible.

it sounds like what you’d like to see is what the current FHIR project is aiming at and is picking up speed since it will most likely revolutionize the way apps work with emrs, http://docs.smarthealthit.org/

#3

Thanks, FHIR sounds indeed interesting, was looking a bit into it. So as I understand it, as long as our future-maybe-implementation supports FHIR, a data exchange to other compatible EMRs (with OpenEMR working on it) should be possible. Is this correct?
This would be great news, since we could give our future users a basic mobile tool, and if they wish they could sync it to a “real” EMR of their choice (or at least one example sync EMR)…

#4

hi @anton, afaik