If it’s in VistA, the FileMan Query Language (FMQL) can get it.
Here’s the first of a series of posts on the thinking behind FMQL’s structure. I want to focus on its more detailed options, but first, let me review the straightforward.
FMQL presents a querier with three operations: COUNT, SELECT and DESCRIBE. Basic COUNT is obvious …
COUNT 2
returns the number of instances of type “2″.
“Type 2″?… Read More »
For us, medical expression boils down to triples, simple subject-predicate-object statements …
The problem is Hypertension
of-patient "Joe Smith"
recorded-on 2011-10-21
diagnosed-by "Dr Fred Jones"
… one triple after another, capturing a patient’s health, and so a key metric for us is how many triples does a typical patient get? Without a figure, we can’t know how big… Read More »
FMQL is hosted under the grand title, Semantic VistA. Why Semantic? It’s not because we based FMQL on SPARQL, the SQL-like query language of the Semantic Web. No, FMQL is a semantic query mechanism because it distinguishes between references to medical concepts and to other patient data. With this capability, it supports simple but powerful patient-data retrieval. Without it, FMQL… Read More »
VistA, the EHR of the Veteran’s Administration (VA), is available to all-and-sundry, thanks to the freedom of information act (FOIA). Anyone can download, what is arguably, the most widely used, enterprise-grade, EHR in America, and use it for free. Obviously any hospital considering a new EHR should give it a once-over.
The VA presents VistA as a set of packages… Read More »
Most enterprise quality EHRs sport kill-you-if-I-tell-you, data access interfaces. And that makes commercial sense: make data easy and pleasing to enter, but make it hard, or at least costly, to get at later. There’s one conspicuous exception: VistA, the Veteran Administration’s home grown and freely-available EHR.
In VistA, as long as you have permission to use its query-anything interface,… Read More »