The data mapping problem's what we're running into as well, and we're just trying to consume a tiny fraction of what's in the EMR for a patient (specifically, we're trying to get medication data into the backend for a service that does some pretty neat patient-specific stuff based on that data).
The service we're interacting with has all the structure we need, but doctors and nurses aren't data entry specialists: for the most part, they seem to ignore all the structured fields that they're given and encode all the information ("Ampicillin 5mg three times daily") as free text in the medication's "Description" field.
The problem's not in the protocol spec here (at least, not for our application). The problem's more a human factors issue-- how do you get the clinics' staff to provide you with the clean, structured data that you actually need? Needs to be something that's lower-impedance than just entering a prescription as plain-text (or they'll continue to circumvent your system), and it needs to require minimal retraining or you're going to get push-back from the staff who are expected to use it.
The service we're interacting with has all the structure we need, but doctors and nurses aren't data entry specialists: for the most part, they seem to ignore all the structured fields that they're given and encode all the information ("Ampicillin 5mg three times daily") as free text in the medication's "Description" field.
The problem's not in the protocol spec here (at least, not for our application). The problem's more a human factors issue-- how do you get the clinics' staff to provide you with the clean, structured data that you actually need? Needs to be something that's lower-impedance than just entering a prescription as plain-text (or they'll continue to circumvent your system), and it needs to require minimal retraining or you're going to get push-back from the staff who are expected to use it.