Ian Haywood wrote: > On Thursday 15 February 2007 08:12, Elizabeth Dodd wrote: >> On Wednesday 14 February 2007 23:41, john hilton wrote: >>> How would you like a surgerywhere in each GP's office the doctor uses his >>> fave EHR frontend prog, from a shared db? >> That's what I was thinking of when Horst made his suggestion. I'd love it. >> I would never be blamed because of my choice of program (although I haven't >> had any for more than a year) > > One of the things I've learnt from trying to write an EHR is that the GUI and > the backend are inevitably wedded fairly closely in term of behaviour. You > can move things around, change fonts, colour etc. very easily, but to > implement a particular workflow on the GUI, you need a matching database > structure.
Yes, exactly right. It is not so hard to generate generic interfaces from a back-end schema, but it is all the bells-and-whistles, the little conveniences and shortcuts that turn an application from clunkily painful into usable. > This is also why a 'common set of fields' to make EHR data portable is very > hard, unless you make it very simple, and then the imported data won't be > as 'rich' as the EHRs own data. For example, you won't be able to do > automatic repeats scripts from the old data, as it's just a free > string "Amoxil 500mg tabs" which the new EHR can't make sense of. You can > read it though, so it's still useful. > > This is not absolute, I think it is possible to have the two interfaces > demonstrated by Richard and Horst talk to the same backend, (and an MD-style > one as 'lowest comon denominator') however it would need very careful > thought, and there would be limits, certain areas were all the clients would > have the same or similar behaviour. The OpenEHR guys are trying to develop shared, interoperable data storage/retrieval as well as automatically generated template driven front-ends for those back-ends. We've yet to see the back-end bits fully working, although they are said to, but I am very dubious about their ability to generate rich, user-friendly front-ends, automatically (or semi-automatically). at some stage, things need to be customised to suit the particular database schema and workflow in use. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
