Thanks @james.roberts - tomorrow I have another commitment in the evening so can’t make this one. Will aim to get to the next one. Thanks for keeping the momentum up.
I would advise that breaking down the parts of an EHR into smaller components might be one way to gradually ‘eat the whole elephant’ of building an EHR.
For example, I have worked on:
- an NHS Number library in Python, and am working on another one in Rust - so handling NHS numbers is solved.
sct- an open source, local-first toolset for handling SNOMED - so handling SNOMED is solved.- Digital Growth Charts with the RCPCH https://growth.rcpch.ac.uk/ so displaying a Growth Chart is solved.
Currently I’m working on a computable ‘Green Book’ for immunisations, which will be able to take a complete FHIR immunisation/vaccination history and the patient’s DOB and tell you if a patient is fully or partially immunised. Sounds simple, but when you get into the detail of cumulative Green Book changes over the last 30+ years it is a LOT more complex than you think!
Clinical Calculators such as QRISK3 and CHADS2Vasc would be a good area to work on. There are plenty of online calculators like MDCalc, but no libraries that would be embeddable in an EHR. Extra points for standardising the UI and for making it work in multiple languages, not just the implementation language.
Each of these components is something that is challenging/interesting in itself, yet is of a ‘manageable’ size for a couple of people to work on and completely solve, with the output being working code and an importable library.