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Welcome!

Thank you for taking an interest in the Open Client Registry (OpenCR)! This is a community project and meant for others to adopt to their use cases as they wish.

Tip

Regardless if you're just curious, an implementer, or a developer, please read the this page first and then the User Manual. We've kept them short.

There are four manuals in the OpenCR technical documentation. Choose the one based on your needs:

  • User: Start here then move on. This covers the basics, use cases, how matching works, and the user interface.
  • Implementer: This manual covers some of the areas important to deploying OpenCR.
  • Developer: This manual covers details for building new features and customizing OpenCR.
  • Sysadmin: This manual shows how to install OpenCR on servers and how to configure it.

What is OpenCR?

OpenCR is an open source and standards-based client registry. A client registry facilitates the exchange of patient information between disparate systems. A client registry holds patient identifers and may include patient demographic information. It is a necessary tool for public health to help manage patients, monitor outcomes, and conduct case-based surveillance.

A client registry sits within a health information exchange (HIE). An HIE is used to safely and effectively exchange information. A critical component of an HIE are registries, such as those to manage a shared, canonical facility list, practitioners, and patients.

What does OpenCR do?

OpenCR is offers the ability to:

  • Assign and look-up unique identifiers,
  • Allow connections from diverse point of service (POS) systems, such as lab systems and electronic medical record (EMR) systems, that can submit messages in FHIR,
  • Configure decision rules around patient matching.

Caution

This implementation does not allow point-of-service systems to get patient demographic information stored in the Client Registry. This is also not a Shared Health Record, nor does it contain patient clinical data.

Use Cases

The Client Registry is one component in a more complex HIS architecture needed to accomplish important use cases, such as:

  • Deduplicating patients: Sometimes patients have multiple diagnostic results stored within a POS. The Client Registry will link patients based on configurable decision rules so multiple test results for the same patient can be found.

  • Tracking patients lost to clinical care: EMRs are often not interoperable with one another, resulting in difficulty tracking patients as they move between facilities to seek care. A Client Registry will help data managers to track patients, decreasing instances of duplicate and incomplete records, patients LTFU, and sub-optimal care.

Caution

The Client Registry is not deduplicating or even touching patient clinical and demographic records within point-of-service systems. Instead, it provides a way to enable use cases like deduplication - which must be an external process.

About

OpenCR was developed by IntraHealth International with support from PEPFAR through the USAID MEASURE Evaluation Project. Technical direction was provided by CDC.