Teaching clinic with multiple providers in different roles

Hi guys and gals,

we are trying to adapt OpenEMR for our school’s osteopathic teaching clinic, which we run on about 50 afternoons per year, and are currently trying to bend OpenEMR into a shape that will allow to help us with the admin. A description of our requirements and ideas are below, but I am sure there are more elegant ways for some of the steps, and I’d be happy to hear/read your comments!

We typically use 6 clinic rooms, with one tutor covering 2 clinic rooms. Students in groups of 3 or 4 are assigned to the rooms for the afternoon. On each afternoon (and for each room) there are 2 slots for patient appointments.
Tutors and students sign up (for a whole afternoon with 2 patient appointments) through an external booking system, which we’ve built in moodle. Patients should sign up (for one single appointment only) through the new OpenEMR Patient portal 2.

  • It seems there is no problem in OpenEMR, when I am assigning a resource (tutor or room) to concurrent appointments, which - in our situation - is an advantage…
  • I am able to assign multiple providers, but without being able to differentiate between tutor and student.
  • Ideally I would even be able to assign different roles to the students (observing/taking notes/doing case history/testing and treating).
  • Ideally I would have a calendar view by room (which does not seem to exist yet).
  • Ideally patients should be able to sign up for an appointment without chosing a provider (because we assign him to them)

Here’s the way I would try to work around these limitations without too much coding:

  • create Room 1-6 as users/providers with calendars
  • create a user for each student (e.g. clinician), maybe with a prefix s_, mark as providers, but without personal calendar
  • create “in office” entry for each student, when he signs up for a specific day (external booking system)
  • create a user for each tutor (e.g. physician), maybe with a prefix t_, mark as providers, but without personal calendar
  • create “in office” entry for each tutor, when he signs up for a specific day (external booking system)
  • when patient signs up for appointment (new openemr portal 2) he sees all available dates for the “providers” room1 - room6 and picks one

–>now tutors and students have “in office” entries for the afternoon, patients are signed up for a time slot and a room

  • clinic admin assigns one tutor (“physician”) and 2-3 students (“clinicians”) to specific appointment (ideally only the students who signed up should be available in the provider-list, currently it shows all providers, which would be much too long)

  • During and after the tretament the students complete the encounter forms (which have to be adapted yet)

  • After the treatment the grouping (tutor-students-patient) should be exported back to Moodle, where the tutor grades the students’ performance.

Has anyone solved a similar problem?Are there any suggestions from those of you who are familiar with the codebase?

Thanks in advance for your help!
Raimund