On Wednesday 14 February 2007 06:58, Elizabeth Dodd wrote: > On Wednesday 14 February 2007 00:53, Dr Nigel Farrier wrote: > > So could you please elucidate on your somewhat sweeping statements. > > > > N > > Having spoken with Richard enough times, it's about the GUI and usability. > Consider this comment I read yesterday in print
Richard wrote a fully functional EHR system more than a decade ago. He demonstarted it to many of us. It is very slick and allows keeping structured records much faster than any current commercial program without the user having to learn much - it is very intuitive and predictable as well as extremely consistent in it's user interface. All that said, it would not suit my style of practising and documenting medicine, my brain is wired differently to his. And here is the dilemma - different users require different user interfaces. If you come to my household, you will see that not one computer desktop of us 6 family members looks even remotely alike. And I am not talking about background images, font sizes or icons. I am talking about command line interfaces vs 2-D desktops vs 3-D desktops vs voice control. My younger son navigates his computer with his joy stick, my older daughter with her mouse, I with the keyboard. We are about equally fast to achieve what we want, but none could do it the other's way at similar speed. It would be so much smarter if we had one mandated standard for backend data storage (of course vendor and platform independent, eg standard SQL DDL + ruleset eg OpenEHR), and then let competition evolve the different user interfaces. Plenty of room for companies large and small as well as private dabblers or FOSS cooperatives to peacefully coexist in such arena. Same could work for information repositories (eg drug data, billing data) - companies could be made to abide by a common format, but what content they will fill it with could be their distinguishing factor that attracts paying customers Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
