Recording Followups with Patient outside of Visits

Software Bahmni
1

Hi, We have a requirement from a potential implementation where they would like to keep track of/document the followups done with patients over SMS, Telephone or Email they have done with the patient. I was wondering what’s the best way to record this in Bahmni. This is not part of any visit so recording using an Observation Form won’t be right as it requires opening up a visit. If the follow up is regarding a scheduled visit then it could have been recorded against that for specific kind of followups, but we don’t have the notion of scheduled visit really yet (Appointment is getting built but not creating a scheduled visit really in system). One way i can think of is attaching Patient Documents. But that’s not structured or analysable/reportable data. Wondering if anyone has come across such a usecase and if solved,how.

I keep feeling that Diagnosis and Follow ups should be first class models in medical record database.

2

Hi, Did you already have a look into the Messaging Module from OpenMRS?

3

Here is its source code:

4

Speaking just from the perspective of the OpenMRS data model, there are a couple of ways to address this:

  1. a Visit with a VisitType of “Phone Visit” and a Location of “Outside of Facility”
  2. an Encounter that’s not tied to a Visit

(In both cases you’d use typical structured observations.)

We don’t really support either of these in Bahmni (nor does the OpenMRS Reference Application 2.x, really) so it would take some dev work on Bahmni to support them. (Among those two options, I imagine that visit-free encounters would require less work.)

@jteich how would you typically document a phone conversation between doctor and patient in an EHR in the US?