On Monday 11 June 2007 21:03:11 Oliver Frank wrote: > An open membership working group has been formed to tackle these > problems under the auspice of the Medical Software Industry Association > (MSIA), Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) and HL7 > Australia. The current industry membership is: > • Argus Connect > • eClinic > • HealthLink > • Medical Objects > Members of this group will work on a technical solution to enable end > users, such as GPs, Specialists, Pathology and Radiology Services, and > hospitals to contract with one provider, should they choose, and that > communication can be directed to any recipient." This sounds like a great idea and its long overdue.
The key issue is the business model. Imagine a "Pathologists' and Radiologists' Communication Company". This is a vendor which refuses to have GP clients and install on their desktops, Instead it has radiologists and pathologists only, and sends to GPs via the other vendors. Advantage? This company does not need to subsidise free installation (which GPs demand) and so can undercut the others for the senders market. HealthLink, MO, et al. then exist solely to provide free support and software to GPs: not sustainable. This is why, in a perverse way, I agree with Tom Bowden: inter-operability must be on a contractual, rather than a standards basis, however I would add this is a consequence of the business model, not of the fundamental technology. Ian Haywood _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
