Re: [Gnumed-devel] gnumed architecture

[Karsten Hilbert]

David,

> As far as I can tell the requirements of clinical HISs are no different 
> to those of doctors in the community,
Functional requirements won't differ much. However, how to
achieve this functionality technically is another matter. E.g.
in a larger hospital it is fully appropriate to dedicate entire
machines to running middleware just for intercepting
persistence access in order to establish an audit trail. A
small GP practice will want no such BS. It is designed
differently, namely doing audit trailing by means of triggers
inside the database (such as we do). That approach will likely
not scale well with increasing network size. A hospital will
likely make applications transparently reroute to secondary
servers should the primary servers fail. GP practices will be
fine with restarting new client instances that connect to the
backup server machine manually. BLOBs will be stored on
dedicated raw data servers, likely on Jukeboxes. No such effort
will need to be expended for a 5 GP group. The list of
technical considerations could be elongated at will.

THIS is my worry about wrongly assuming that a PMS is easily
scalable to being a HIS.

I don't oppose, however, GnuMed being *used* in hospitals FWIW.
*I* just won't spend any significant amount of time
*designing* for that.

Karsten
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