I am responsible for a medium-size organization that needs to find a DB solution for archiving its many documents (around 40000, most of them already in electronic media).
This is interesting. And to what type of documents where you refering to?
We need to be able to classify the documents according to several attributes (e.g. vendor number, hospital number, equipment series, service, location, description, ...), and make searches based on those attributes.
So, it seems that besides a Document Management Systems (DMS) you will be needing some kind of knowledge processor to also classify them.
Ability to define security of accesses is, naturally, required.
That is important in healthcare and, in special, with personal clinical documentation.
Does any of you know if your organizations have similar tools ? Do you recommend them ?
I worked at 2 hospitals in which they digitized and/or archived all kinds of documents: a) paper based patient clinical process (that because of legal reasons or because those papers pre-dated the installation IT system), b) files from word processor, calc sheet and presentations (mostly Word, Excel and Powerpoint), c) acrobat .pdf files documents. These were widely available in any terminal as they were mostly protocol procedures and good practice manuals d) One hospital even wanted some of the building blue prints (in a format from a program named AutoCAD) to be kept online. These were the blue prints regarding that hospital fire and emergency plan and were available to people from that hospital's fire department and security department.
Most of the applications were proprietary (Canon and Siemens). At that time we were asked for suitable Open Source replacements but we could not find any. The systems were surprisingly efficient for b) c) and d). For a) it was never able to meet the clinical corps expectations, things were not easily found and the documents were stored as some kind of .tif format in a page-per-page basis. Very annoying indeed.
Since then I have heard of OpenDocMan and Knowledge Tree as being open source. They are well regarded at Sourceforge and Freshmeat. I have no experience on them and I do not know anyone with hospital experience of them.
As this seems to be common to most healthcare organizations I also will forward your question to the Openhealth list, as we find there people with many years of experience on hospital IT and open source resources.
There is a mail archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/ were you may follow the discussion at the Openhealth list, or better yet, you could subscribe to that list (although at this time it will be somewhat difficult as that list is being reshaped).
Best regards,
J. Antas
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