Tim Churches wrote:
Jon David Patrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Tim, is there a role/need for developing an open source API for
accessing the HCN databases?
Given the dominance of HCN software in Australian general practice, yes, I
think such a facility would be very useful. Legal advice would need to be taken
about such a thing, but my reading of the Copyright Act suggest that it would
be permissible. However, HCN has tried to sue a competitor previously because
the competitor happened to use the same column names as HCN's product in one or
a handful of databases tables. They dropped the law suit in the end, but it
demonstrates their litigousness.
I think this was all resolved amicably, after the competitor changed the
table and column names.
Of course, the first thing to do would be to talk to HCN
Jon / Tim
I think this is a great idea, although I am not really sure what an API
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Api) is. ;-)
As I understand it, HCN is happy for you to access the information in
your databases. Their license says, "All supplied databases are
copyright protected. None of them may be copied, or used outside of the
Medical Director software program (Medical Director), or reproduced in
any way or by any process, without written permission from the copyright
owner." I interpret this to mean their database layout and stored
procedures are all copyright but accessing the data contained within
them is permissible. In fact, they provide a read only authentication
mechanism called hcnreader, that allows you to access the SQL data
directly. I have recently revisited this using OOo Base and their ODBC
connector as we talked about a few months ago
(http://ozdoc.mine.nu/index.php/Medical_Director).
Accessing the data in MD3 is an area of increasing interest to many
Australian GPs. As you will have seen in last month's budget
(http://www.npcc.com.au/Media%20Releases/Budget_release.pdf) , the Feds
have enhanced funding for the NPCC (http://www.npcc.com.au/). In
addition to Cardiab, other commercial groups like the Canning Division
of General Practice
(http://www.canningdivision.com.au/lnk_downloads.html) have developed
data extraction tools for pulling relevant clinical data from the
various EHRs including MD2 and MD3. The areas they are focusing on are
IHD, DM and asthma.
I've also been puddling around in MS SQL in the last few days. The
appended scripts do fun stuff like identify those patients that (1) are
overdue for a DM SIP consult and (2) have IHD. (Kuangie, did I get it
right?)
Writing a script to pull out data for a particular patient should not be
too difficult and this facility is already available through the MD3 GUI
with output in XML format. I presume this would be ideal for further
manipulation into other formats including SQLite
(http://www.sqlite.org/) for Google gears.
I suspect that HCN would not be too keen on any "API" that would not
permit the writing of data directly to the database. I don't have too
much of a problem with this since data can be incorporated via the
existing pathology import facility into letters, investigations or
documents.
One restriction at the moment with the HCN database is that progress
notes and letters are encrypted. This will be a problem for Jon since
his interest is in NLP (nosological linguistic programming :-D. Again I
understand the decrypter is available from HCN but for obvious reasons
they are a bit particular about who gets access.
I'd certainly be interested in working with others to improve health
care for the Australian community by unlocking the potential held within
our databases. Perhaps Jon would be the best person to co-ordinate this
effort.
David
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Diabetes SIPs due
SELECT CM_PATIENT.FIRST_NAME, CM_PATIENT.SURNAME, CM_PATIENT.DOB,
SERVICE.ItemNo, VISIT.VisitDate
FROM CM_PATIENT INNER JOIN
VISIT ON CM_PATIENT.PATIENT_ID = VISIT.PatientNo INNER JOIN
SERVICE ON VISIT.VisitRecordID = SERVICE.VisitRecordID
WHERE (SERVICE.ItemNo = '2517') AND (VISIT.VisitDate < CONVERT(DATETIME,
'2006-06-16 00:00:00', 102))
ORDER BY VISIT.VisitDate DESC
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finding IHD Patients
SELECT DISTINCT
CM_PATIENT.SURNAME, CM_PATIENT.FIRST_NAME, CM_PATIENT.DOB, CM_PATIENT.STATUS_CODE, CM_PATIENT.PHONE_HOME,
CM_PATIENT.STREET_LINE_1, CM_PATIENT.CITY, CM_PATIENT.POSTCODE
FROM MD_HISTORY INNER JOIN
CM_PATIENT ON MD_HISTORY.PATIENT_ID = CM_PATIENT.PATIENT_ID
WHERE (MD_HISTORY.HISTORY_CODE LIKE 'angip%') AND (CM_PATIENT.STATUS_CODE =
'A') OR
(MD_HISTORY.HISTORY_CODE LIKE 'surg.coroa%') OR
(MD_HISTORY.HISTORY_CODE LIKE 'ihd%') OR
(MD_HISTORY.HISTORY_CODE LIKE 'myoci%')
ORDER BY CM_PATIENT.SURNAME, CM_PATIENT.FIRST_NAME
_______________________________________________
Gpcg_talk mailing list
[email protected]
http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
