I am seeking to learn about RIS Systems in general and how to interact with them programmatically. HL7?? Do you know of any resources that could help me understand RIS systems out in the wild? Books, github projects or articles would be really useful at my stage of research.
It took some tome to understand PACS systems but Information on RIS systems seems even more scarce.
Are there standard protocols that can be utilised? Can a secure client be setup to fetch patient data and match it to new studies from a PACS system?
We discussed this recently @ibacher and I. In fact RIS and EMR/EHR systems are largely overlapping, and ideally OpenMRS should provide RIS features through its UI, there is little value in the RIS being yet another system that would be integrated with the EMR/EHR system, if this can be avoided (but in some contexts the RIS predates an upcoming EHR system and therefore it can’t be avoided.)
In short it is possible to view the RIS as a patient management system that is good at supporting and documenting the interactions between patients and radiology workflows, requests, imaging procedures, etc.
I would love for OpenMRS 3 to provide a RIS user experience, but this is something that hasn’t been prioritised yet by anyone.
In the light of the above, well, it would seem that a RIS should just expose a FHIR API, which is what would be expected from an interoperable EMR/EHR system as well. Except that all the RIS-PACS integration still needs to support a lot of HL7 v2 with known and well documented IHE profiles. See for instance this very indigestible IHE Radiology (RAD) - Technical Framework
It would be great for others to step in as I’m sure I made a lot of shortcuts: @ibacher@burke@mogoodrich
