Tim Churches wrote:
Oliver Frank wrote:
There are a number electronic clinical messaging systems available in
Australia. The Argus clinical messaging system is the leader in
desirable features, including the facts that it is the only
non-commercial system in wide use and that it imposes no charges to send
or receive messages.
"Non-commercial" is not quite right because the Argus folks *are*
running a business (and that's a good thing, and they should keep doing
so). However, apart from a) the lack or per-message charges, the other
things which sets Argus apart are that b) it is the only openly
interoperable secure messaging system, c) the only one that will keep
working even if the vendor goes belly-up or decides to withdraw from the
Australian market (due to its reliance on well-support and ubiquitous
SMTP mail services provided by every ISP and data centre and even every
practice Linux server in the country), and d) the only one which has its
main software code base freely available under an open source license.
a) and b) make the Argus approach extremely scalable and c) and d) make
it a very low risk proposition from a business perspective.
My use of the expression 'non-commercial' was intended to convey the
fact that no person can ever collect any profit that may be generated by
ArgusConnect, because the ownership of the IP of Argus is vested in a
not-for-profit Foundation established to provide health informatics
software in the public interest. (This is my non-lawyer's understanding
and explanation). It is true in a strictly legal sense that
ArgusConnect is a business, but it is a business only because lack of
government funding that many of us believe that Argus should be
receiving forces ArgusConnect to generate income in order to be able to
continue operating. Simply describing ArgusConnect as a business
misrepresents it because normal businesses are run for the personal
profit of those running them, which is not the case with ArgusConnect.
I hope that Ross Davey may be able to come up with a one sentence
explanation of how Argus differs in this important respect from all of
its competitors.
--
Oliver Frank, general practitioner
255 North East Road, Hampstead Gardens, South Australia 5086
Phone 08 8261 1355 Fax 08 8266 5149 Mobile 0407 181 683
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