On Thu, 24 Sep 1998, Joseph Dal Molin wrote:
> I strongly agree with your assessment of the LTC software situation. We are
> on the verge of some major change in this area especially when you factor in
> homecare. With the changing business models the existing software is even
> more obsolete. I think work in this area would be very welcome.
Agreed. My employer just switched to a new SCO Unix-based LTC financial
software package at the beginning of this year, after using an IBM
System/36 for the past 13 years, and we are experiencing a great deal of
frustration with our selection. Our old package included the source code,
which we adapted and customized a great deal to meet our needs. The new
package does not include source, and while I have been able to achieve
read-only access to the database to allow custom software to retrieve
information, there are many areas in which considerable improvements could
be made.
For some time, I have been thinking of developing a LTC financial package
which would run on Linux and use one of the SQL databases that have been
ported to that platform. I have done some preliminary design work on
database layouts (I currently use MySQL, but am also looking at ADABAS D
and Interbase), and with 14 years of experience in the LTC computing
environment, I have some ideas as to what would be ideal in a LTC software
package. If anyone is interested in forming a team to work on this
project, please let me know. If there is sufficient interest, I will make
available the work I've done so far.
