DH Field EMR
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User Guide

For the clinician using the app in clinic. How to record a visit, find a patient again, and keep working when there is no signal.

This page assumes the app is already installed and set up on the device in your hand. If it is not, start with the Setup Guide.

DH Field EMR is not a certified EHR and is not HIPAA-compliant. It is built for global health field work outside the United States. Follow whatever your own organization and country require for patient records.

Starting a visit

Open the Records tab. This is the tab the app opens on. Tap + New visit.

The visit form opens over the patient list. It is one long page. Scroll down and fill in what is clinically relevant. Some sections start closed to keep the page short: Procedures, Referral, Imaging, Surgical Encounter and Notes. Tap the heading to open one.

Your organisation can rename sections, hide the ones it does not use, change their order, and add its own questions. So the form on your device may not match this list exactly. The names in this guide are the ones the app ships with. On an admin device this form is edited under Form setup, where it is called the encounter form; it is the same form.

To leave without recording anything, tap Cancel at the top or the bottom. If you have typed something, the app asks Discard this visit? Anything you have entered will be lost. Tapping the dark area outside the form does not close it, so a stray tap cannot lose your work.

What you must fill in

Six things: Given name, Family name, Site, Date, Sex, and either Date of birth or an Estimated age. Everything else is optional. If one is missing the save does not go through. A red box headed Check 2 fields, or Check 1 field when only one is missing, lists exactly what is wrong, and the form jumps to the first bad field.

The patient number, and why you cannot type it

Near the bottom of the Patient section is Patient number (MRN). The box is read only and the hint under it says generated automatically. You do not type it and you cannot change it.

The number is built from the first two letters of the given name, the first two letters of the family name, and the date of birth as DDMMYYYY. Grace Achieng, born 12 March 1991, becomes GRAC12031991. Until you have entered enough, the line under the form title reads Patient number generates from name + date of birth.

This matters in the field. Nobody has to keep a register, hand out cards, or look up a number before seeing the patient. Enter the same name and the same date of birth and you get the same number, on any device, in any clinic, even on a device that has never seen that patient. That is how a return visit joins the visits already recorded.

If two different patients share the same initials and the same date of birth, the second one gets a letter added to the end, first B, then C. Numbers stay unique. Names in Amharic, Arabic, Cyrillic and other scripts generate a number normally.

Spelling decides whether the chart joins up

The app matches a returning patient on the name and the date of birth. A name spelled differently, or a different guessed date of birth, produces a different number and a separate chart. Before you invent a spelling, check whether a blue Returning patient box appears, and search for the patient in Records first.

Vitals

Temperature is checked for plausibility on save. A value outside 25-45 °C is refused with Temperature 101 °C is outside a plausible range (25-45 °C). Check whether it was entered in Fahrenheit. This catches the most common vitals entry error before it reaches the record.

Heart rate, respiratory rate, SpO2 and height are not in the standard Vitals section, and they cannot be added inside it. In Form setup the built-in sections, Vitals among them, carry a Built in chip and have no Questions button. To add these readings, an admin device taps + Add a section in Form setup, types a title over New section, then taps Questions on that new section and adds one question per reading. The new section can be dragged to sit next to Vitals, and it then appears for everyone.

History and chief concern

The History section holds three boxes: Allergies, Current medications and Past medical history. These describe the patient rather than today, so they can be carried forward from the last visit. See A second visit.

The Chief Concern section has a Chief concern box and, under it, tappable pills of the complaints your organisation uses most. Tapping a pill adds the complaint to what is already written, separated by a semicolon. It never wipes what you typed. Tapping the same pill again takes that one complaint back out and leaves the rest alone. Tap two or three, then type the detail that matters.

Labs

The Labs section shows the tests your organisation has configured.

The red Lab+ badge in the records list comes from the POS and NEG tests only, and only when you ordered the test and marked it POS. So a positive malaria or HIV test is visible without opening the chart. A numeric result the app reads as abnormal does not set the badge, and neither does a urinalysis row such as nitrite POS. Those are recorded, but you have to open the chart to see them.

Diagnosis

One box, Diagnosis. Write the diagnosis in your own words. There is no code picker and no preset list to hunt through.

What you type is what appears under the patient's name in the records list, in the chart, and in the CSV export. Keep it short and consistent with the rest of your team so the export is usable later.

Records created in the older version of the app may already carry ICD-10 codes. Those still show in the chart as Coded and still export. They cannot be added or changed on this form.

Medications and the quantity to dispense

Tap + Add medication to add a line. Each line has:

  1. the drug, chosen from your formulary (Select medication)
  2. the dose, in the box beside the drug. It has no label, only the grey hint e.g. 500mg or 2 tabs. Write a number of tabs or an amount in mg
  3. Frequency: Once (single dose), Once daily q24h, Twice daily q12h, Three times daily q8h, Four times daily q6h, At bedtime qhs, Twice daily topical, As needed PRN
  4. Duration: Single dose, 3d through 28d, 4 weeks, 6 weeks, or Ongoing

Choosing a drug fills in its default dose from the formulary if the dose box is still empty. Change it if this patient needs something else. The × at the end of a line removes it.

What the small number beside each line means

Once a line is complete, a quantity appears next to it, for example 21 tabs. That is how much to dispense: dose, times frequency, times duration. Read it before you count anything out of the box.

Three other things it can say:

This is arithmetic, not a safety check. The app does not check your stock, and it does not check the dose against the patient's weight, age, pregnancy or allergies. Those remain your judgement.

Treatment notes, below the lines, is for injections given, wound care, counselling, and anything else that is not a prescription line.

Procedures, imaging, surgery, referral

A referral is recorded on the visit itself. There is no separate screen listing referrals to work through. To see who has one, open Filters on the Records tab and set Referral.

Saving, and Save & next patient

At the bottom of the form: Cancel, then Save & next patient, then Save.

Save records the visit and closes the form.

Save & next patient appears only on a new visit, never when you are editing one. It records the visit, clears the form, keeps Site, Date and Provider, scrolls back to the top, and shows a green line: Saved Grace Achieng (GRAC12031991). Ready for the next patient. Use it when you are working through a stack of paper forms after clinic. You set the site and the date once.

Tapping Save twice cannot create two copies of the same visit.

If a save fails, a red Not saved box appears with the reason. A save never quietly reports success when nothing was written. Fix what it names and save again.

Finding a patient again

Everything on this page is on the Records tab.

Four tiles across the top count what is on this device: Visits, Patients, Today and Pediatric (<18).

The search box reads Search name, patient number, concern, diagnosis.... It searches the name, the patient number, the chief concern, the diagnosis, the site and the provider. Part of a word is enough.

The Filters button opens Site, Provider, Referral, a From and To date range, and Reset. Filters stack, so "seen at Kabale by Grace last week" is one search. When filters are on, the button shows how many, like Filters (2).

The list shows one card per patient, not one per visit, most recently seen first. Each card shows the latest site, the latest visit date, sex and age like F/34y, and No. GRAC12031991, then the latest diagnosis. Badges tell you the rest at a glance: Lab+, Referred, Pregnant, and 3 visits for anyone seen more than once.

Long lists are cut off: Showing the first 150 of 412 patients. Narrow your search to see the rest. Type part of the name or the patient number rather than scrolling.

If nothing matches you see No visits match those filters. If the device has no records at all you see No visits recorded on this device yet. Remember that visits entered on another device only appear here after this device syncs.

The chart and the vitals trend

Tap a patient card to open their chart. It slides in from the side and is read only, built from what was saved. The header shows the name, then Patient number GRAC12031991 · F/34y · DOB 12/03/1991. When the age was estimated rather than known, the date of birth is followed by (est.). The buttons are + New visit and Close.

Reading the vitals trend

When a patient has two or more visits, a Vitals trend table appears at the top of the chart. Columns run V1, V2, V3 from the oldest visit to the newest, each with its date. Rows are Temp, BP and Weight. A dash means that value was not recorded at that visit.

Values are coloured against fixed thresholds: temperature amber from 37.5 °C and red from 38.5 °C, systolic blood pressure amber from 130 and red from 140. The colour is the same for every patient. It marks a number worth looking at, nothing more. It is not a judgement about this patient, and a value with no colour is not a normal result.

The table is most useful for the things a single reading cannot show: a weight falling across three visits, a blood pressure that is high every time rather than high once, a fever that has not settled since the last course of treatment.

The visits themselves

Below the table, each visit is a block, newest first: Visit 3, then the date, site and provider, then the vitals, history, labs, urinalysis, and the clinical detail (diagnosis, the medications written out in full, treatment notes, procedures, imaging, surgery, referral and notes). Questions your organisation added appear under Additional, with your organisation's own wording. Anything left blank is left out entirely, so a short block means a short visit, not missing data.

Each visit block has two buttons.

A second visit for a patient you already have

Do not create a new patient for a return visit. There are two ways in, and both put the visit in the same chart.

From the chart

Open the patient and tap + New visit in the header. The form opens titled New visit for Grace Achieng. Name, sex, date of birth, phone and patient number are already there, and so are Allergies, Past medical history and Current medications. Everything clinical is blank. Check that the standing history is still true, then record today.

From the records list

Tap + New visit and enter the name and date of birth as before. When they match a patient already on the device, a blue box appears reading Returning patient, with a line such as 2 previous visits · last seen 2026-03-14 · Malaria, and a button Copy allergies, history and medications forward. Tap the button to bring those three forward. The patient's existing number is reused either way, so the visit joins their chart.

That one line writes the date the other way round, year first, as 2026-03-14. Everywhere else in the app a date reads DD/MM/YYYY.

When the device is offline

Every visit is written to the device the moment you save it. Nothing waits for a network. Working offline is the normal way to use the app, not a fallback, and a full day of clinic with no signal changes nothing about how you enter visits.

The button at the top right tells you where the records stand:

On a connected device a chip such as 12 pending sits next to the button and counts what has not gone up yet. It refreshes on its own.

You do not have to press anything. A connected device syncs shortly after the app opens, again as soon as signal comes back, again when you return to the app, and every two minutes while you work. Tapping the button forces a sync now.

If a sync you asked for did not work, the app says so, starting with Not backed up. and ending "Try again when you have signal. Do not wipe or hand on this device until this clears." Take that literally. Records that have not synced exist in one place only, on this device.

Before this device leaves your hands

Check that the button reads Synced and that there is no pending chip beside it. If it does not, today's visits are nowhere else yet. Do not hand the device on, wipe it, or pack it away until it clears or your admin has taken a backup.

Messages you may see

Where to go next