Managing data in a medical office with GECAMed

Database and Adaptation

The database used in GECAMed is PostgreSQL; with appropriate skills, this allows you to make adaptations that meet your personal requirements. With the PgAdmin program from the Ubuntu repositories, you can manage the database in a graphical front end (Figure 6), which means you can add billing numbers dictated by your national ruleset (e.g., the German ruleset in my case).

Figure 6: Assuming you have the necessary skills, PgAdmin lets you modify the underlying database to add new billing values relevant to your medical office or to create specific rules.

Entering individual billing numbers is also conveniently supported directly in the Billing module by clicking the appropriate button. The corresponding tables are available in Billing . In principle, nothing keeps you from importing the whole table of fees for doctors, but for individual testing or addition of specific billing numbers, the Billing module provides an Add button (Figure 7).

© © Centre de Recherche Public Henri TudorFigure 7: The Billing module.

Letters, Invoices, Forms

To create invoices, it is a good idea to rely on the LibreOffice word processor. The Letters and Templates module gives you the opportunity to store appropriate templates with placeholders for fields in the database, and integrating the address management system contained in GECAMed was problem-free in my tests. If needed, you can design an appropriate letterhead and invoice templates in LibreOffice.

An integrated form editor lets users create printing templates adapted to the special needs of the medical office. If that is not enough, you can export the pre-configured printing templates in the JRXML format of the free reporting software JasperReports [3]. You can thus modify the reports in the Jasper iReport program and then upload the data once again.

The software will not overwrite the default templates. This means that you can use a specific version of a report available on the system for each registered doctor or assign a specific version of a template.