Graham, have you ever looked at interfacing to Microsoft Healthvault or Google Health instead of Synapse's own PHR? This has advantages since one will not have to host the PHR and patients may be able to utilize their existing logins. also, These PHRs are already intrefaced with some pharmacies and labs. But then, there is always the concern about what these companies do with this kind of information. Marius
Synapse's portal preceded both of those products [] As for interfacing ... I think there are issues about resolving conflicting data, and trusting data that has been entered by the patient into their PHR. Google health uses the CCR which Synapse can parse, but realistically there doesn't seem to be much demand that I know of. So, my development time is better spent on other areas until this becomes more important.
CCR or something like it will be required for meaningful use, though not in 2011 from my recollection. Anyway, I have decided to re-write my CCR parser which basically just printed the parsed text to the console. My new parser which I have written over the last couple of days is a GUI browser that inspects the CCR. Unfortunately the CCR does not use a constrained vocabulary, and there appears to be significant variation as well. So, what does one do when one imports a CCR which has elements referencing a terminology that we don't support?
Maybe you could add something to your importer that works like some CSV importers, where column one with rows shows the existing term field names in synapse, and column two shows the field names in the document being imported. The CCR parser could then allow the user to map the imported terms to the existing terms in synapse. You could even have a more-or-less blank table in synapse where the user maps "Synapse Custom Field 1" (maybe user gets to rename the field in synapse?) to "External CCR Field 3". This would not work for demographic stuff, obviously. For imported data to be useful, e.g, "FIRST NAME + MIDDLE INITIAL" has to be mapped to FNAME in synapse.
Beta 20 has the new CCR parser - called "CCR viewer" on the function menu. Click on it to bring up a requester ... to then load the CCR. You can download some sample CCRs fromhttp://www.solventus.com/aafpsa_2005_ccr_gallery.htm Right Click on any of the XML links and save it locally. Then see if Synapse can parse it using the new viewer. If you have a MS Healthvault account, or a Google Health account, try and see if it can view those CCRs too. Note that there is a limitation in that if you have more than one of the same item, eg multiple tests called "weight" it will only show the first one ...to be fixed ( or not ).
