Jim Self wrote:
> VistA and COSTAR each embodies a tremendous amount of knowledge and
> practical experience of medical information. They have each been installed
> and proven effective in many hundreds of medical institutions.
>
> To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing comparable outside of MUMPS.
> I would be very surprised if the totality of all other open source medical
> software has more than a small fraction of their functionality.
>
> The main obstacle to the use of MUMPS software in open source projects is
> the lack of an open source implementation of MUMPS itself. This is being
> addressed with the GUM project and FreeM.
>
Without a doubt MUMPS is a major player in medical systems. In
addition to VistA & COSTAR, McKessonHBOC Star System is MUMPS
based. It is a hospital management system. Very modular. Very
customizable. I do not work with it on the MUMPS level (the
resident SQL module that I work with is called KB_SQL from
http://www.kbsystems.com). AFAIK, McKessonHBOC is the largest
vendor of medical software? SAP may be close??? Our system has
about 9 years worth of data (billing mostly, but it includes
EVERY lab order, radiology order etc.) for a 125 bed rural
hospital.
So, as a stand-alone system it works well. But it does not have
the resources to allow interaction/communication with other
systems. Even other HBOC installations. They may be working that
direction but it is a very expensive proprietary system.
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Tim Cook, Coordinator FreePM Project
http://www.freepm.org
Open Source for a Free World
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