Absolutely agree Tim
Unfortunately it would probably not return commercially to the developer - ie it would make most sense for health funders ie govt. They dont seem ready for such ideas. Even if it were a total failure I suspect it would be worth doing as it might make the commercial providers play ball with interoperability. It would also require a maintenance infrastructure which would need to be funded

R

Tim Churches wrote:

syan tan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
oops, wrong here as well. It's not bad ; it is probably strongly bound
to the underlying middleware zope and plone, but the organization is
not clueless. It's a little different from gnumed . For instance, it has a consultation and a progress note, and a
procedural report section ( eg echo, stress test). the consultation
and progress note section look identical, single text box entry
but associated with a date field and a doctor field. The procedural
report section looks like what the consultation section should look
like, e.g. with free text boxes for every aspect of a medical report
with the option of importing existing information in each section
e.g. past history, medications, allergies .
The script section does look like a database row entry, but is as
simplified as what is normally usable, e.g. free text drug name,
free text script instructions, with boxes for quantity and repeats,
and script validity date. It also adds some script mx functions such
as retirement of medication and reason for retirement.
The immunization and allergy sections look not done.
The results and documents section look like file upload screens
with metadata entry, but the results section gives the hint that an
attempt will be made to parse the file uploaded for metadata
information, such as which patient, and category of result.
There is a section for entry of vital signs;
recalls are called health maintenances , with three fields , recall
date, type of recall, and reason for recall / eh .. health maintenance.
The appointments section is adequate too - it has 3 views,
month by hour, giving rapid overview of available appointments, multiple doctors view for the secretaries, and single doctor's view
for doctors, pretty much  basically what we get in oz.
So it is better than openemr, and it looks like several months work,
given it might have gone over one iteration, unless the guy
who did it worked it out on paper first, and worked within the
limitations of his platform, which is what it looks like, so it
could have been several weeks work.

Yes, yes, fine, OK, whatever, but the political point that I am trying to make 
is that building a capable and very sound open-source primary care EMR for 
Australia is *not* a few afternoons work, not even for Horst, but *nor* is it a 
$100 million exercise. It is, instead, about 8 to 10 person-years effort by 
half a dozen smart people working full-time on the project over the course of 
12-18 months of calendar time, at a total cost of $1.5 to $2 million. I can 
think of no more cost-effective investment to improve of our nation's health 
than that, because it would save hundreds of millions by simplifying the 
creation of shared EHRs and other initiatives, and it would provide an open 
platform for a whole range of decision-support, quality assurance and public 
health program plug-ins. And much more.

Tim C

On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 07:01 +1000, Tim Churches wrote:
Well, that's its name. It is a new, open source, Web-based EMR for the
US market, based on Zope and Plone, which are intriguing but probably
quite sound choices for infrastructure (uses an object database, not a
relational database - makes much sense for clinical data). See
http://www.uemr.com/index.html

Probably not usable as-is in the Oz setting, but yet another
demonstration that it *is* possible to create viable open source
clinical apps with very modest investment. They mention "four years of
effort", probably by one to three people - thus around 10 person-years
of effort. That's around $1.5-2.0 million of investment. Would be
money
well spent by a govt agency or even a private philanthropic concern in
the Australian setting (or even sponsorship by a private health
insurance company - what better way to promote yourself but to have
posters in GPs' waiting rooms say "the computer software used by this
practice is proudly sponsored by...". No need to wait 4 years: half a
dozen smart people could do it in 12-18 months, with increasingly
polished prototypes to show off and get active feedback at monthly
intervals along the way. That's what Australian patients and health
professionals deserve.

Tim C
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