bradymiller wrote on Thursday, September 13, 2012:
Hi Tony,
I think it’s a bit different. My above post actually sparked the interest of somebody whom is working with Medline Plus Connect and sent the below email to me:
This message might be a little bit random, but bear with me. I work for the National
Library of Medicine as a Technology Coordinator and I am currently working to inform
people about MedlinePlus Connect and help them set it up in their EHR and/or Patient
Portal. Due to the way our organization is set up and because MedlinePlus Connect is
free/doesn\t require registration, I haven’t seen an active instance of it.
I came across one of your postings in the OpenEMR forum (I have set up the OpenEMR
appliance on my machine and am trying to learn more about it) and saw that you
mentioned using Connect as a way of achieving Stage 2 Meaningful Use. I'm curious if
this means that you are actively running the web service or web application? And if so, if
you’d be willing to chat with me a bit about your experience setting it up.
Here was my reply:
The current implementation in OpenEMR for ‘Patient Education’ can be found in
OpenEMR in the left menu at Miscellaneous->Patient Education. Note, we have several
options, Medline, eMEdicine and WebMD which basically just work by sending the
search term(s) to the search engine of these web sites(ie web applications). Although
we are already using Medline as you’ll note in the address created we go through the
vivisimo search rather than your Medline Plus Connect web application/service. This is
enough to fulfill stage I MU.
For stage 2, placed the ONC criteria here:
http://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/Patient-specific_education_resources_(MU2)
It appears will need to electronically identify the patient education material by diagnosis,
meds, labs of a patient, which your Connect engine can be used for since can search for
ICD/rxnorm/loinc etc. So, will likely utilize this within OpenEMR for stage 2. How it actually
gets implemented will likely not be decided until the NIST certificiation criteria come out
for ‘Patient-specific education resources’ criteria and how it gets recorded for it’s
accompanying AMC measures; since the NIST cert criteria are the practical things that
much be done, hard to come up with a solution until see those.
Again, depending on the NIST criteria, hopefully the web application to Connect will
suffice (since it's much easier to open a browser window than parse service data and
display it). But will need to wait before making the decision of whether to go with the web
application vs service method of Connect until then.
I hope this explains things well.
Pretty cool to see that their service is having a very similar problem to the OpenEMR project (inability to track if and how many users are using it).
-brady
OpenEMR