Transferring/importing/bootstrapping from legacy
systems
To better help any reading I will want to do, could I ask some
overview of options or best methods of getting data from a legacy
system into gnumed?
Presently, I maintain some patient information in a program used
for billing, with the data stored in FoxBASE .dbf (dBase-compatible)
tables. It is organized loosely as follows:
- patient table fields including
surname + given names, date of birth, sex, health
insurance num, demographics
foreign key (administrative identifier) of other
providers (family & referral doctors)
- link table (patients' diagnoses)
- icd9 table (into which I had created some extra, "custom"
codes)
I am not sure whether there exists for postgres any tools that
permit it to "read" from the native .dbf form in which my
data is stored, or whether that data would first need to be exported
into tab, comma or standard delimited format.
But even with my data converted into a readable format, I did
wonder what kind of scripting I would need to get someone (e.g. local)
to do up for me.
I noticed that the bootstrap files seem to specify within them
both the fields and the actual values of the data, rather than a
statement like "append from
fields ". Is the latter approach both supported
and reasonable or must all data to be imported be specifically
spelt-out inside a file that also contains the import syntax?
Also, the first time this is done on an "empty" gnumed
database, all records that survive the data requirements/constraints
will get appended. But if any records are rejected (fail the
constraints), is the entire file import rejected? And if "no"
(meaning the valid subset of records *is* imported) is there any
automatic or standard practice that captures the records that were
rejected?
Has anything like this already been programmed / submitted into
the CVS? The only information that we have so far on the wiki
is:
http://salaam.homeunix.com/twiki/bin/view/Gnumed/DevelRefMisc#AnchorDataImportersAPI