Hi,
What are the recommended OpenMRS strategies for building a robust longitudinal health record that effectively tracks and differentiates between:
New episodes of seasonal illnesses (like cough, cold, fever, flu) and their follow-up? Specifically, for seasonal illnesses, patients often improve after the initial visit and only return during the next occurrence of a new episode. How can we effectively close the previous episode and capture a completely new episode in OpenMRS, ensuring a clean start for Chief Complaint, Diagnosis, History, etc., while still retaining the data from past episodes for the longitudinal record?
Ongoing management of chronic conditions (like hypertension, diabetes, or stable psychiatric conditions)? For chronic conditions, patients typically present for follow-up visits. These visits are inherently connected to previous encounters and should be treated as follow-up visits, where providers assess the current status and potentially adjust medications. How can OpenMRS clearly represent these as follow-up visits, with relevant diagnoses and encounter context readily visible in the EMR? ?
Ultimately, how can we ensure providers can easily capture this information in OpenMRS in a way that supports both independent treatment of each acute episode AND a comprehensive understanding of the patient’s long-term health history for improved clinical decision-making?
@grace@burke@dkayiwa@ibacher any input on this please, or any specific implementer whom i can reach to.
Any pointer would be very helpful !
Thanks in advance!
You are right, it is handled by visits, i am looking how we can track seasonal or short term illness , like flu etc.
for kids we occasionally visit pediatrician due to flu , viral and sometime one visit is enough or may be 2 visits and patient only returns to pediatrician when again down with flue etc , may be after 2-3 months , so these episodes would be of one or two visits, then may be next episodes after 2-3 months.
I am just trying to understand , what are the best practices to manage these, the episodic (comprising of 1 or more than one visits) and chronic (treatment for speression , anxiety , diabetes etc).
Since all these can be entered via visits, are you asking for how to display them on the patient dashboard? Or how to run analytical reports for this data?
How to glued/link these visits together that this is episodic for flu, this is for another, this is for chronic etc.
How logically these could be grouped, and when patient comes next time, based on this what could be shown, like this visit is follow-up for chronic illness xyz and we are treating these symptoms, these are medications ongoing, these are lab results etc,
or it’s fresh visit and sign symptom has to be captured.