[Gnumed-devel] Transferring/importing/bootstrapping from legacy systems

[J Busser]

To better help any reading I will want to do, could I ask some overview of options or best methods of getting data from a legacy system into gnumed?

Presently, I maintain some patient information in a program used for billing, with the data stored in FoxBASE .dbf (dBase-compatible) tables. It is organized loosely as follows:

- patient table fields including

   surname + given names, date of birth, sex, health insurance num, demographics

   foreign key (administrative identifier) of other providers (family & referral doctors)

- link table (patients' diagnoses)

- icd9 table (into which I had created some extra, "custom" codes)

I am not sure whether there exists for postgres any tools that permit it to "read" from the native .dbf form in which my data is stored, or whether that data would first need to be exported into tab, comma or standard delimited format.

But even with my data converted into a readable format, I did wonder what kind of scripting I would need to get someone (e.g. local) to do up for me.

I noticed that the bootstrap files seem to specify within them both the fields and the actual values of the data, rather than a statement like "append from <filename> <format> fields <fieldnames>". Is the latter approach both supported and reasonable or must all data to be imported be specifically spelt-out inside a file that also contains the import syntax?

Also, the first time this is done on an "empty" gnumed database, all records that survive the data requirements/constraints will get appended. But if any records are rejected (fail the constraints), is the entire file import rejected? And if "no" (meaning the valid subset of records *is* imported) is there any automatic or standard practice that captures the records that were rejected?

Has anything like this already been programmed / submitted into the CVS? The only information that we have so far on the wiki is:

http://salaam.homeunix.com/twiki/bin/view/Gnumed/DevelRefMisc#AnchorDataImportersAPI