Re: [Health] A question about GNU Health scalability, logging and extensibility

[Hedayat Vatankhah]

Hi Luis

Luis Falcon <address@hidden> wrote on Sat, 26 Nov 2011 12:45:16 -0300:

Hi Heydayat

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 3:22 PM, Hedayat Vatankhah
<address@hidden> wrote:

�Hi all,

We have recently decided to promote GNU Health in some of the hospitals in
our city. We have some simple and fundamental questions about GNU health
which we didn't find about them elsewhere (sorry if it is our fault). BTW,
it would be nice if you answer or give me links which could help me in this
regard.

First, we'd like to know about the scalability of GnuHealth/Tryton. For
example, about the largest institutes GNU health has been implemented for.
How much simultaneous users can use this system efficiently and how large
the database (the number of patients per day and number of stuff, etc) can
be while maintaining acceptable usage? I know that these cannot be
determined exactly, but I'd like to know if the approximate limits are
known? sorry for the vague question.

You might want to check on http://health.gnu.org/community.html

Having postgres as the database server is, in my opinion, a guarantee.
We have designed GNU Health with scalability in mind, so you should
have no problems in general.

Of course, the load depends on many things, not only on the number of
records, but also on concurrent users, real-time reporting and data
analysis (for large institutions we recoommend using an OLAP GNU
Health Server ), type of records (if you are storing images instead of
linking them... ).

Yes, Thanks.

Second, is it possible to trace the edits in the system and have a history
of changes in the system? For example, which user has changed the patient
info at a specific date?

Yes, you can audit, but you have to consider the load on the system
(both in performance and size).

I'm not sure (and I'm not very familiar with health systems) but probably it'll be needed to know for example which physician has prescribed a specific medicine in case it become problematic?! So, I wonder if such an audit is needed in many places.

Finally, can we use one instance of GNU Health to manage multiple health
centers which are managed by a single institute while maintaining security
and manage how different health centers access and modify patient
information?

We use the institution field in most ot the models, so you can have
different health centers in one single database.
Then you have to think about if you're going to be dealing with
multi-company environment (different chart of accounts,  different
users... ). There are pros and cons in both cases.

Again, sorry if my questions are "bad" ones. I will try to learn more about
this software soon :P

Not bad ones at all :-) Very reasonable questions.
I think the answer for both the scalability and centralization  is a
matter of design. Technically is possible.

Have a great weekend.

Thanks a lot,
You too!

Regards,
Hedayat

Thanks,

Hedayat