Survey: Integration of bio-medical equipments with OSCAR EMR system

Abstract

The use of Electronic Medical Record Systems for managing Clinical Data is on the rise in India. With many hospitals and medical institutions ready to adopt one or the other EMR application for their data management, a major drawback in their system resides in the fact that apart from medical history and other clinical data entered by the clinicians, evidence-data like CAT scans, X-rays, PET-scans, Lab Results, etc. cannot be stored in these systems. OSCAR EMR is a robust open-source clinical data management system that allows users to upload evidence-data in the form or PDF, JPG, PNG file formats. With the option to upload and store such data in various file-formats, it is still difficult to convert the data output from various medical equipments into computer readable formats, transfer it to a computer system and then upload it to OSCAR EMR system. With this problem in mind, we will be investigating the options to integrate the following medical equipments directly with OSCAR EMR such as X-Ray machine, MRI machines, CAT scans, PET scans, Ultrasound. We will work upon creating interfaces (using hardware or software as needed) to output the data from these equipments into DICOM format and create easy to manage networks that will enable these DICOM data to be sent to the OSCAR system directly along with the patient ID. Key Words: OSCAR EMR, CAT scans, X-rays, PET-scans, Lab Results, etc