Last week I gave a Care2x presentation (downloaded from sourceforge) to a workgroup of the Department of Health which was meeting to develop specifications for an anti-retroviral module for HIS.
A brief background: the National DOH has HIS specs which are generally used as a template for each of the provinces to tender for HIS from commercial vendors. Most of the provinces has some form of HIS installed in their larger hospitals - each province has gone their own way and there are currently 5 vendors used in the 9 provinces. As you can imagine, there are huge inter-operability problems between the different provinces - most vendors claim HL7 compatability; however currently no two provinces' HIS are 'talking to each other'. There are moves afoot to establish a MPI - master patient index, which should help this situation. South Africa also has one of the largest HIV infected populations in the world, as well as an AIDS dissident as President. Fortunately in the last few years he has stepped back from the AIDS debate and national government are now planning an anti-retroviral (ARV) drug rollout, starting 1 Apr 2004. There is also a national general election due in a few months time. Kurt Brauchli from FOSSFA (Free and Opensource Foundation for Africa - http://www.fossfa.org) has started a mailing list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) for Care2x and also put a demo on http://www.fossfa.org/demo/care2x. This has only happened in the last few weeks so we're still finding our feet. My presentation to the DOH found some support for Care2x. If we can develop an ARV module quickly for Care2x, we could find ourselves a lot more support. I believe that it is the way forward for software in Africa and other developing parts of the world. The question really to be answered is who can develop the module - I think we should try to do it within the FOSSFA group as I think we should not have to rely on Elpidio for all the coding! Are there any guidelines for coding modules? It might save some time for us, as well as for others later. These are interesting times for Care2x - everyone is doing a great job! Regards, Mark Painter ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ Care2002-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/care2002-developers
