OpenMRS Integration With UnaCasePro
We recently updated UnaCasePro's API and I wanted to show how we integrated a full UnaCasePro referral PDF into a patient record within OpenMRS. The benefit of this full-circle integration is to close the loop on patient care between case managers and providers. Getting information on a patient from a case manager rarely happens due to the time and effort to share this information. The barriers to this information have been and continue to be a labor-intensive, fragile process at best. Having referral information is extremely important to patient care as it adds critical history to the medical record that allows for better diagnoses and treatment paths otherwise not available.
Background
We decided to use OpenMRS as it has a nice API built-in that we can utilize out of the box with minimal configuration. This was appealing for this demonstration and also a test as to how quickly we could get UnaCasePro's data into an EMR. The other reason we used OpenMRS for this integration is that it's open-source and readily available to download and install. While your organization might be on EPIC or Cerner, the concepts will be the same and the idea of this blog post is to help you understand how it was done at a high-level and the possibilities that are available for integrating UnaCasePro into your electronic health records system.
Implementation
We examined the OpenMRS API and put together a document mapping out how to extract data from UnaCasePro and the steps needed to integrate it into OpenMRS. The most important part of the process was to identify a match of patients in both systems otherwise the two systems wouldn’t be able to talk to each other.
- Identify patient matches in UnaCasePro and OpenMRS.
- Flag the matches so a human can review for accuracy.
- Once reviewed and deemed a match, UnaCasePro updates the client record with the ID of the patient in OpenMRS. This is the key to match the patient in both systems.
- Scheduled service to be configured update OpenMRS based on criteria that determines if a referral has been updated. If a referral has been updated, we send the PDF over to OpenMRS and notify the provider of the update.
Once we went through this mapping process, we determined the best path forward was to take our main referral PDF (contains all referral data) and attach it to the attachment section in the patient record. The main referral PDF contains everything captured in UnaCasePro so a provider will be able to get the full history on the patient from this PDF.
Results
The final result is seen in the image below.
This image shows the UnaCasePro referral as a PDF attachment in the attachments section of a patient record. The provider will get notified of this update for this patient and will also get updates on any other patients that get updated attachments from UnaCasePro. This is a huge time-saver and allows providers access to information on their patients not previously possible due to the disconnected nature of case management systems and EMRs.
I hope this post gives you shows you how we were able to integrate into an EMR (without getting too technical) and get's you excited about the possibilities of extending UnaCasePro within your existing health care systems.