Re: [Gnumed-devel] gnumed architecture

[David Guest]

Karsten Hilbert wrote:

Since gnumed is aiming at conquering large hospital system just the
same as small private practices,
    

I do *not* second this. At least not before 3.0. I for one
simply don't care about HIS'. If a hospital finds that GnuMed
fits its outpatient department - so be it. If they submit
patches so that GnuMed generally plays nicer with their HIS -
I'd accept those patches after the usual review. But I won't
take much of a (larger) hospital's specific needs into
consideration for GnuMed design. I do acknowledge that in many
countries the distinction between a "mini-hospital" and a
GP-type private practice are much more blurred than here in
Germany so this may warrant some further thought if that need
arises.
  

Karsten

I was going to try to dissuade you on this but then I decided you really agree with Horst. :-)

As far as I can tell the requirements of clinical HISs are no different to those of doctors in the community, irrespective of whether they work in large group practices of solo. In Australia there is a dearth of useful hospital packages for clinical departments and the ones available are not OS.

In fact locally we have the situation of some hospital departments sucking data out of their PMI to store in the popular dbf style EHR that has been in use by Australian GPs for over 12 years. It's a dumb thing to do but it solves their immediate data problems so that now they can actually get some of their data on the computer.

As you infer above, I also live in hope that one day hospitals will be producers of FLOSS code and stop mainlining on the next proprietary code fix. The one thing that hospitals do have is a bit of money for IT. They just have to be taught to be a bit more caring and sharing.

David