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- Register a patient's demographic information
- Query for a specific patient or for a list of patients
- Update a patient's demographic information
- Save a patient's encounters to a central health record
- Query for a list of a patient's previous encounters from the central health record
A comprehensive description of the exact use cases that OpenMRS supports for the RHIE can be found here: OpenMRS System Use Case and Design - 23-02-2012. Below the main interactions are described.
When a patient arrives for maternal care at the clinic the registration clerk first looks them up on the local OpenMRS system. If they cannot be found on the local system a query can be made to the Client Registry. The OpenMRS system makes a web service call to the OpenHIM to query for a patient matching the criteria that the registration clerk enters. The OpenHIM accepts and stores the message, it is then passed on for mediation. In this case the message is de-normalised to a form that the Client Registry can understand and no normalization or orchestration functions are required. The OpenHIM makes the call to the Client Registry, processes the response and returns a list of one or more patients to the OpenMRS system. OpenMRS displays the choices to the user to verify which record matches the patient. If the patient cannot be found in the Client Registry, the registration clerk enters the patient demographic information and this gets sent as a message to the Client Registry through the OpenHIM. This workflow can be seen in the following image.
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