[Gnumed-devel] Re: Medical/Dental OSS survey

[Andreas Tille]

On Mon, 24 Apr 2006, Kevin wrote:

> -odontolinux (apparently a LAMP-type web-based application; seems like it 
> might be a dead OSS project---is anyone using this in production? has there 
> been any recent development?)

I'm rather a Debian developer than a GnuMed developer and thus my experience
with most projects is limited.  From a Debian point of view I know Odontolinux
which was written by a dentist and Debian developer (in one person).  My
personal view is that this project is currently not really usable and seems
to be dead upstream.

> I also found this list:
> http://www.linuxmednews.com/LMNProjects/Projects/Practice%20Management/folder_contents
> some entries of which are really nothing but ideas at this point, though 
> (LinuDent).

Some years ago I had a look on this and regarded it as unusable.

> My short-term goal here is to find a stable, production-ready dental practice 
> management software suite for my wife's business

IMHO (as I said spoken from an external point of view)  GnuMed has the
potential to be driven also into this direction.

> in the near future and at

The near future issue might be the biggest problem ...

> this point, it seems to me that for practical purposes (electronic insurance 
> claims, stable, HIPAA-compliance, etc), there are not many options available 
> right now,

Yes.  In my eyes the fact that there are lots of projects in an unusable
state makes things worse because it splits the man power that is even
very small if it would be thrown on one single project.

> That said, however, I 
> also have a view of the long-term and I'm a strong supporter of open source 
> projects and I know I'd enjoy helping to make something like that become a 
> reality at some point in the future, regardless of what my wife chooses for 
> her business.

Sounds like a very honorable point of view.

> Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any replies.

If your resaearch uncovered even some more things you did not discussed
in your list above I would be interested.  The Debian-Med project tries
to collect these projects and to package those that seem to be a good
traget.  I'll foreward your mail to address@hidden to add
the result of your investigation to our dental section of

    http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/

Kind regards

          Andreas.

--
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