On 26/06/2007, at 11:51 AM, Greg Twyford wrote:
What is best for our users? A single big, increasingly unresponsive
corporate-owned product? A range of boutique clinical products each
with low market-share and the potential for takeover, market
annihilation, or disablement of a single, key developer?
Hyundai isn't going to go broke anytime soon. This doesn't mean that
Jaguar and BMW will.
How will most Divisions, with no, little or decreasing IM&T staff
time and expertise support a range of clinical products, let alone
one predominant one? How is the market going to resolve any of
this? How will government or Divisions resolve any of this?
I can't speak for how or why divisions are or should be doing IT
support, but I can tell you how I do it - hire great technicians,
train them well and pay them well.
Can we really recommend to anyone that they place their patients
health records in any of the products in the market under the
current circumstances? Possibly yes, if you have a narrow
commercial self-interest. Probably no, if you have an interest in
the nation's health outcomes in the long run.
Leaving any interest out of it, what is the alternative? Provided the
data can be extracted from the product, it's a hell of a lot better
off in there than on paper.
As previously discussed, we just need a meta database format that
vendors are "encouraged" to support.
Doing this is really easy - you put all of the existing database
fields into the pot, remove the duplicates, merge where necessary,
decide on a sensible naming convention and voila - there is your
standard. All vendors do not have to use all fields but they must be
able to export all their fields into this format. It's a couple of
days work for a good DBA at most.
That's the easy part taken care of. Now how do we go about getting
vendors to comply with exporting?
Peter.
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