Re: Free Clinic
2012/7/13 Chuck Peters <cp@axs.org>:
> A volunteer of our local Free Clinic asked me about migrating the
> patient records from Microsoft Access to another sql database. I could
> help them setup a Debian server, but I have no experience with medical
> records systems or migrating db's from MS Access to whatever.
(I am assuming that they use some custom-built Access-based software
to manage their records.)
The difficulty of such a migration totally depends on the source database:
* What do they store? (Does everything have a corresponding “field” in GNUmed?)
* How good do they want the result to be? (Is it ok to migrate a bunch
of things in a free text form, i.e., is it good enough to just “not
lose” the previous data?)
You probably will have to go through their database schema, identify
the meaning of each column in detail, and make decisions regarding the
above questions. Then you would probably write a script to read,
convert, and inject the data into a GNUmed database.
Typically, you will come across a bunch of fields whose “structured”
text contents are filled in manually by the users, requiring some
analysis of how they typically enter/format the corresponding
information, and parse it using the resulting heuristics. Trivial
example: If the source database stores a name in one field that
contains the first and last name concatenated, and the target database
requires separate fields for the first and last name, you will have to
split the content of that field during the conversion. Most other
cases are more complex.
If the answer to “How good do they want the result to be?” is “Doesn't
really matter”, then the above becomes a whole lot easier.
Nicolas
--
A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion.
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