Goals - Why integrate with EMR?

Improve productivity by reduced manual data entry
Better data quality
Powerful reporting (E.g. demographics, consents, surgical pathology reports, etc.)

Implementation Options

There are many ways OpenSpecimen can be integrated from EMR.

Login to OpenSpecimen
Enter an MRN
OpenSpecimen looks-up EMR data and returns match.
If no match found, error.
If the match found, the user can review and confirm that the patient is correct.
Once created, the details pulled from EMR cannot be edited in OpenSpecimen.

This applies to the integration with any EMR like Epic, Cerner, Velos, etc which can send HL7 messages.

EMR sends HL7 messages (ADT) to OpenSpecimen to add/edit patients on a preconfigured port
OpenSpecimen processes the incoming messages, cleanses, and stores the resulting patient and visit records in the staging table.
When an end-user does a search on MRN, OpenSpecimen searches the staging table and display the registration form with the prefilled patient information. When a match is not found, the registration form is blank/empty.
The records from the staging table are purged after every 90 days. The retention period is configurable.

Every night, the EMR team provides a CSV or a database view/table with all the patient information.
The schema for the table will be provided by OpenSpecimen.
This table will be used as the "staging patient table" which will be used for lookup whenever a user enters MRN in the user interface.