I was more thinking FUD around MSSQL and MSDE rather than MD3 particularly. I'm still undecided about MD3 until it's been around a bit. (At least the script printing ad splash screens are gone)
I'm hoping to convert the practice we manage early in the new year. I'll test it somewhere first of course. There will be some reworking of reporting tools, but I'm not too pessimistic about it. HCN will give you a read only password for the PS3/MDW3 db & I have connected to it (but haven't done anything seriously with it). I also remember in some of their news letters (seems like decades ago) they asked for people who had addon apps for MD2 to contact them to make sure that the same things were possible in MD3. I can't imagine any Vendor not allowing the connecting of external reporting tools to your own data. (I could be proved wrong though). btw, I'm only just starting to play with Open Office Base (apart from the casual look I had at the beta). It's looking good. Should be able to connect it to just about anything from windows or linux via JDBC, ODBC or native support. If I do anything for division reporting, I think I'll do it in OO so that any practice can use it for themselves if they like. Better than doing it in Access. There are quite a few practices that don't have Access licenses. I guess I could use a commercial product that produces an executable , but OO is looking good for being able to put together reporting fairly quickly and being able to install it just about anywhere. Linking to MD2 in OO works fine from Linux too. Native support for dbf files. Just mount a windows share (I'll use a copy of the MD2 files rather than the dir the practice acitvely uses) then connect to external db > choose dBase > browse to location of the files. If the path is consistant, it should open at any practice and work. I can get a practice server to schedule a file copy of the needed MD2 files to a separate directory once a week or so, & the practice can run OO reports when ever they like. Usefulness of data is another issue. The db I've picked on to try some reporting has thousands of uncoded diagnosis entries. I'm not a clinical person, but some of them look pretty odd. One diagnosis that comes to mind is "home troubles". If it related to depression, I'm not sure that you would ever pick it up. Is there a central repository that Divisions are contributing tools to? I want to go through the exercise myself so that we can be flexible depending on division programs or practice requests. I'm happy to pass on any stuff I do (once it is past the tinkering stage). Regards, Neil McAliece IM/IT Manager Murrumbidgee Division of General Practice Ph (02) 6953 6454 Fax (02) 6953 6653 web www.mdgp.net.au email [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: Greg Twyford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], General Practice Computing Group Talk <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 11:43:12 Subject: Re: [GPCG_TALK] SQL Server Express webcast Neil D. McAliece wrote: > I've also pointed out that MSDE is not as limited as the FUD that seems to > float around about suggests to quite a few people. It's a hard message to get > through. > > With a document manager storing attachments, scans etc in the filesystem, no > one should have 4gb of data in the database. > > If you are a 10-15 machine practice moving from flat file to MSDE, you are > going to be ahead (so long as there are no show stopping bugs in the client > software and you're not using a pentium II as a server) > > I'm not sure about the file size warning with such a small amount of data. > HCN told me recently that they had done successful conversions of 7GB MDW2 > databases. Neil, I think the FUD is inevitable as its taking us so long to get to see it and gain some experience of the data conversion processes and the pitfalls. I know from other experience that the lousy data integrity that MD2 permits is a major factor, and cleaning up databases will be a huge issue for some practices, and is inevitably one they'd encounter moving to most other software. My other concern is the implications of MS SQL for the current crop of 'data extraction' tools being proposed as part of the answer to Divisions' need to get practice level outcomes data to retain their funding. This will apply to both MD3 and Practix. I suspect that 3rd paty tools won't cut it and someone will have to go to HCN and IBA and pay for them to implement these things. The price for doing this may be 'right', unfortunately. The paranoia from many GPs here in Sydney, and possibly elsewhere, about Primary Health's role with MD may have a big impact on the acceptability of all of this for GPs. 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