[Gnumed-devel] Re: A few questions

[Jim Busser]

On 2010-01-25, at 5:24 AM, David Mackenzie wrote:

> 1) In Australia, messaging between ... Does GNUMed already have a way to 
> handle incoming messages, and, either pass them to Mirth or Mirth poll a 
> database/directory for them? Or does this functionality have to be either 
> built/borrowed?

At present the lab results supplier gives no good option except to require a 
credentialed user to perform an attended (manual) login via Firefox to load the 
XML messages and then do a "Save As" saving the file into a local machine or 
local server directory. The lab does also supply a non-browser GUI client for 
Windows, but this also requires an attended connection and only save a couple 
of user steps, but without enabling automatic downloads.

Mirth could be set up to point to, and poll, a stable destination directory and 
I would propose that an additional step in the Mirth import script, after the 
import would be completed, would move the source file to a different (e.g. 
"imported") directory.


> 2) The current medical software programs dad uses have the concept of a 
> "message holding bay", whereby doctors can view all messages that have 
> arrived at the surgery and chose to import them into the database.

I think that if the import-into-Mirth channel has a corresponding 
Mirth-into-GNUmed channel then the first these these (whether manual or via 
poll) should trigger the Mirth-into-GNUmed process to run. 

When there was no such "partner" channel for a given import-into-Mirth, then 
people would need to develop a new one in Mirth, or a custom one in GNUmed, but 
the thinking was that any manipulation that may be needed might be better done 
in Mirth.

> There is a screen which lists all the doctors names as found in the incoming 
> messages with some details about the message. Is this a feature you are 
> familiar with and desire? This would be a feature of GNUMed and not Mirth. 
> Mirth would simply put the messages into the "message holding bay" in the 
> database.

You were maybe referring to the GNUmed database (since Mirth does also have its 
own) but instead *all* Mirth messages being dumbly copied into a table, we were 
thinking to

1) allow the raw messages to live in Mirth
2) Mirth would try to match messages to identifiable patients in GNUmed
3) Mirth would write matched results into GNUmed results tables etc
4) Mirth would write unmatched lines (messages) data into
        clin.incoming_data_unmatched

so #4 could be what you describe (as unmatched results) for the doctor to know 
about.

> This may need to be thought through a bit further, as the messages may 
> require further parsing once the import to database function is selected.

http://salaam.homeunix.com/bin/view/Gnumed/LabImporters#Importer_specifications

-- Jim