The OpenEMR Foundation is excited to announce a strategic partnership with the Opal Health Informatics Group!
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What is the current status with the partnership with Opal?
Hi Warren,
Sorry for the delay in responding. Your post was just brought to my attention yesterday as I had not been following the forum. I lead the Opal Health Informatics Group and I’ll gladly give you an update on the OpenEMR-Opal partnership. Our main point of contact in the OpenEMR Foundation has been Stephen Nielson, who has been incredibly helpful.
Over the last 8 months, the OpenEMR-Opal collaboration has led to a bunch of activities. Unfortunately, it never occurred to me to post updates about them on the forum. I’ll do that going forward. We have, however, been keeping our LinkedIn page up to date. Please check it out.
Here’s a quick summary:
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We have a live demo of Opal and OpenEMR that is operational. You can try it for yourself by following the instructions in our User Guide: docs.opalmedapps.com/user/.
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In May we did an end-to-end demo of OpenEMR and Opal at the Digital Health Summer School at Maynooth University in Ireland. We demoed creating appointments in OpenEMR, patients viewing them in Opal and checking in for them using Opal’s Room Management System (RMS).
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In September, we presented Opal and OpenEMR at the UN General Assembly Digital Health Symposium in New York. There, we did our first demo of a patient with Opal sharing their data from OpenEMR in the International Patient Summary format using a SMART Health Link QR code. This functionality is now in our live demo so you can try it yourself (IPS in the Chart menu of Opal). The reaction at the symposium was palpable with one person saying “this is Star Trek!” The IPS and SMART Health Links are very powerful.
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We have done a lot of work to get the French translations of OpenEMR and the IPS viewer by the Commons Project up to scratch for use in Quebec, where the Opal team is based.
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At the present time, we have two vendors actively working on using Opal with OpenEMR.
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Currently, we are working on implementing the SMART check-in process that Josh Mandel (at Microsoft) recently talked about on a LinkedIn post. Basically, it allows a patient to share part of their OpenEMR data with another clinic by logging into Opal and approving the sharing of some of their data to the other clinic. We have a proof-of-concept operational and hope to publish it on our Github in the New Year. We would like to extend this to partially auto-complete intake forms using OpenEMR data.
We have lots more ideas and lots of work. Unfortunately, however, we are funding limited and our small team will only be around for another few months unless we can source new funding to keep us going. Ideas welcome!
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