Andrew, While it was tempting to ignore your last posting, it contains various insinuations and inaccuracies that go a bit beyond the usual level of exaggeration found in day-to-day competitive banter.
1 You say in your email below ..."I do not think you can say you have the full support of the other vendors". Whereas I simply (and accurately) stated..."Our paper, and the accompanying draft code of practice (both of which are receiving support from a range of parties including other messaging system providers)....." 2 You say "To suggest you have a contract with every player is unworkable"... That doesn't tally with our experience, why ever not? There are not an infinite number of players. 3 You say "We tested the REF message support in January" Fine but it is now March and a number of parties have been working on the matter since that time. 4 You do not think that the relationship between messaging and clinical vendors should be a financial one. OK, but not everyone shares that view. Who will recognise the vendors contribution to support, testing of systems etc, etc? Why should they support a messaging vendor's business at no cost? With respect, that is a commercially naïve stance. We have always had commercial relationships with our partners, they are in place now, they are working well and we will continue doing so. 5 I am puzzled by your reference to our shareholder/joint venture partner "Orion Health", neither they nor we sell any clinical applications to general practices, specialists or similar providers. Part of taking a sound commercial approach is being very clear about the fact that we won't compete with our alliance partners (either directly or indirectly) in fact we do everything we can to make them successful. I think this needs particular emphasis, I do not wish to be misunderstood on this matter. 6 You say you offered to integrate your tools with HealthLink. My recollection of the "offer" is that we expressed interest in doing so on a proper commercial basis rather than under some form of ad-hoc arrangement, upon which news your interest ceased. Andrew, I think that in fairness to other list members, you should launch any further attacks offline. Alternatively you could restrict your correspondence to constructive and slightly more light-hearted dialogue on these rather arcane matters. Kind regards, Tom Bowden -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew McIntyre Sent: Wednesday, 21 March 2007 10:53 a.m. To: General Practice Computing Group Talk Subject: Re: [GPCG_TALK] Management of Messaging Thanks Tom, >From our discussions with the other vendors I do not think you can say you have the full support of the other vendors. Our position it that we we should be using common open interfaces and that the interface to the clinical system should also be standard (Ideally the same in fact). To suggest that you have a contract with every player is unworkable. The contract is that they process Compliant messages in a reasonable way and produce compliant messages. We tested the REF message support in January in the Hunter and it is still not working to an acceptable extent. You had been testing it for 12 months prior. I do not think the relationship between messaging and Clinical vendors should be a financial one, but a standards based one, You have not responded or given any assurances there. We may well have software components that overlap in functionality with other vendors but in a component based world that is always the case. As a "Son of Orion", Healthlink also has that issue. Our components are actually in use by other vendors and it allows them to produce AHML compliant HL7 messages easily, and at this point in time I would argue that just messaging is not enough to make it work, and we have demonstrated that we can make it work between GPs and specialists now. The actual messaging is only part of the story. Compliance with standards and message transformation to achieve that is another layer that is needed now. We even offered to integrate our tools to integrate with Healthlink sending, but you declined. Andrew McIntyre _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
