OpenMRS Data Model support for Drug Administration Guidelines & FHIR

Development
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Context:

  • Right now, OpenMRS data model has no way to store key elements related to drug orders, e.g. dose frequency (“twice a day, for the next 7 days” etc). Instead it’s modelled as JSON. So the backend is not used to order medications, instead the JSON file is used.
  • Thing blocks our software from managing things like explicit Drug Administration Guidelines.
  • Three related things are happening around the community right now which should probably have FHIR support for what FHIR calls Doseage.
    • the 3.x Drug Orders feature (@mksd what’s the priority in your mind of FHIR support for the drug orders details?)
    • this emerging medication orders/prescribing work in the Bahmni@next squad (@mohant what priority is the backend support or specifically FHIR drug dose details support for this work?)
    • the new 3.xDispensing Module work that PIH will start shortly (designs are done) (though @mogoodrich I’m not sure whether the backend doseage modelling is a priority for you here?)

As you can probably tell above, I’m not entirely sure of the priority of this need, but hope we can unpack this here.

What @jdick did help me understand a while ago is:

  • Not yet supported in backend --> FHIR modelling:
  • commonFrequencies → Doseage:Timing
  • commonDoseages → Doseage:___ (not sure)

Thanks!

CC @burke @dkayiwa @ibacher @pmanko @angshuonline

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Mmm, what about OrderFrequency? (Then used here in DrugOrder, but not only). Or are we talking about something else?

That one has even been supported by Iniz for a long time btw, here: https://github.com/mekomsolutions/openmrs-module-initializer/blob/master/readme/freqs.md#domain-orderfrequencies

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Yeah, as I understood from @jdick the problem is providing backend support for this file, i.e., some metadata about common formulations of drugs that can be ordered so we can simplify the clinician process for entering orders. It’s a sort-of-lightweight-formulary.

There is also some work to be done in the FHIR API to support creating drug orders and validating that it works as expected.