Unsolved Do you track medical records?
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Each hospital here has their own system and our yearly insurance renewal sometimes covers some hospitals and next time they might not. We as of now don't have a specific hospital that we go. Just started this year with adetailed health check and thought its a good idea to keep this saved somewhere handy for future reference.
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This has been a problem in medicine since the beginning, it's so fragmented. There is no centralized collection of all of your medical data, unless you maintain it.
This is true for all kinds of things though, car repairs, house repairs, etc.
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I worked with an EMR for a few years and fragmentation definitely still exists. You can securely transmit EMR data to other hospitals, but there's no standard. The other hospital receives it and has to add it as an attachment to their chart data. There's a lot of discussion in those circles around standardizing EMR data sets and it's just a matter of time. Our EMR was highly XML so it's definitely possible.
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Most systems are XML based these days - but for whatever reason, they don't output their data in a standard format. If I want an interface between my system and the Lab down the street, I have to pay both sides to setup that interface, generally something around $3K each. WTH? I though they were both suppose to out put to HL7, and assuming they can both import HL7, then there should be very little setup needed.
On the other hand, we are receiving CCDs via Direct Messaging (DM) as explained above, and that does seem to integrate into our chart much better than previous things with a lot less work or expense on us.
So if this DM thing can continue forward, a centralized health record managed by someone like Microsoft ( I really don't want to have to have my own server for this) and we can get EHRs to enable the inclusion of a patients own controlled record.. that would be nice.
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Oh yeah HL7, it's coming back. Man you can make big bucks as an EHR integration coder.
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@TAHIN said in Do you track medical records?:
Oh yeah HL7, it's coming back. Man you can make big bucks as an EHR integration coder.
Why is this?
Does HL7 not have all the (I'm going to talk out of my ass because I'm not a programmer and I have no clue what I'm talking about) tags it needs to identify all of the possible incoming/outgoing data points?Or is it even worse than that - it's a jargon problem - where different areas of the country some call is soda, some call it pop, and the worst, some call everything a coke, even Dr Pepper - it's just a coke. LOL
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Our database guy and our web guy built an application that converted our whole system to ICD10 since our EHR didn't do it natively. This app saved our finance folks about 1000 hours of work. Our CIO, who was always good at converting ideas to cash (very good quality for a non-profit) started selling it to other clinics who used the same system. eCW eventually caught wind and wanted to buy it. He gave them a price about as ridiculous as what they would have charged us for it... they refused haha. It was a good shoe on the other foot sort of story.
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@Dashrender said in Do you track medical records?:
@TAHIN said in Do you track medical records?:
Oh yeah HL7, it's coming back. Man you can make big bucks as an EHR integration coder.
Why is this?
Does HL7 not have all the (I'm going to talk out of my ass because I'm not a programmer and I have no clue what I'm talking about) tags it needs to identify all of the possible incoming/outgoing data points?Or is it even worse than that - it's a jargon problem - where different areas of the country some call is soda, some call it pop, and the worst, some call everything a coke, even Dr Pepper - it's just a coke. LOL
All I remember about HL7 is that we paid someone a bunch of money to deliver something they already built for someone else. I'm not sure how hard it is but it sounds like a cushy gig. EDIT: And I know that's how software works... but this was an interface. Usually highly customized.
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@TAHIN said in Do you track medical records?:
All I remember about HL7 is that we paid someone a bunch of money to deliver something they already built for someone else. I'm not sure how hard it is but it sounds like a cushy gig. EDIT: And I know that's how software works... but this was an interface. Usually highly customized.
And they probably took a loss on it just to get it developed enough to be able to sell it to a second person.
Development is expensive.
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Yeah same thing with ERP software. They have things that work for most people, and when you need something special you have to pay to develop it for just that use case.
Not cheap at all.
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If it's just for documents (PDFs and such) you could use an ECM like alfresco or even a simple Drupal site with content types and entities for each category.
Ex. A full content type for a document received from a Dr and a simple entity for things like blood pressure levels. Then just have views nicely display it all.
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If it's PDF, are you proposing manually pulling the data out for the nice displays?
