Overview
EMR (like Epic, Cerner, etc.) contains patients’ demographics and clinical data, among other data. Integrating EMR with OpenSpecimen enables biobank staff to look up patients based on MRN and register for a study.
Reasons to integrate EMR
Data accuracy: Avoid manual data entry errors EMR pushes the data automatically to OpenSpecimen.
High-quality data: Data will always be in sync with data in EMR. OpenSpecimen will automatically update the participant records when a patient record is updated in EMR.
Save time: Reduces time taken by the biobank staff while registering participants.
HL7 based integration
All stand EMRs can send HL7 messages. OpenSpecimen can receive the HL7 messages to add, edit, merge, and delete patients. Since most of these patients will not have specimens collected, the plugin stores the data in a staging table.
When the biobank staff registers a new participant in OpenSpecimen, it will look up the staging table based on MRN. The system moves the patient from staging to the OpenSpecimen database if it finds a match.
Any data fetched from EMR is “read-only” in OpenSpecimen. This will ensure that no one updates data in OpenSpecimen, and EMR will remain the single data source.