Due to some "interesting" professional circumstances, I have documented here how I no longer use openmolar as my practice management system.
One upshot of this is I have been forced to get to know "Exact" from "Software of Excellence" (sic) , and "R4" from Carestream Dental.
Some of my patients (friends mainly) now have a dental record spread over those three systems.
Exact tried to migrate the data from openmolar, and created a record for each. They did an appalling job resulting in 90% data loss (estimate), but that is a different story.
For R4 new records were created.
Having examined the schemas behind R4 (Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2) and Exact (Proprietary binary nonsense), I have been scratching my head over how to proceed.
The epiphany is that a patient (such as myself) with information on all three systems, has 3 records. Merging that data into any one system is a hugely complex issue, but this intermediate standardisation will be a sensible first step. There will be contradictory data, overlapping data by definition.
I have decided today that the way to do this is to create a flexible dental record format, and write scripts to pull what I can from each.
IT IS MY SINCERE WISH THAT I CAN MAKE THIS DENTAL RECORD FORMAT INTO A RECOGNISED STANDARD FORMAT
- perhaps registered with the iso. I will make all xsl stylesheets available open source and welcome input from any genuinely interested source.
Having began some work on this, I realised that I should code a basic "dental record viewer" and put it online.
Ultimately - could this lead to a central database / website (for example MyDentalRecord.com) where a patient can securely share their information between clincicians?