"Alvin B. Marcelo" wrote:
>
> At 18:27 08/03/00 +0000, you wrote:
> >With Dr Ballester's permission I have cross-posted this to the
> >openhealth list since I believe that his thoughts are appropriate
>
> Tim, there must be millions of Ballesters out there!
I didn't want to exaggerate! :-)
> Here are some of my thoughts:
>
> 1. The health professionals education system is in a flux/transition. The
> graduates of 2010 will be more adept with computer science than the
> graduates lastyear. At the same time, they know their own workflow enough
> to design their own (proprietary-design, open source built) EMR. This is
> where I see things are going. How about the others in the list? Do you see
> the future differently?
You make a very good point. How can we help? By defining an
open communication standard to allow these 'roll-your-own' apps
to interact. But then we've all known this for some time. :-)
What I'm saying is that we ARE on the right track and I believe
that we will succeed.
> 2. Come to think of it, even the healthcare disciplne is being swamped by
> the open source ideology. In 1950, my dad was a walking blackbox...pulling
> ampoules from his bag and injecting them in children. The expected effect
> was cure. If some kids worsened, no one had enough knowledge to raise a
> hoot. But now, medical knowledge is "open source" (www.clinicaltrials.gov
> for example). Even medicine is in transition.
>
> 3. In fact, every aspect of life seems to be in transition since there is
> rarely a domain that is not information dependent.
>
> We all agree that open source, as a method, is a good thing. But we cannot
> agree on how this good thing should be incarnated for health.
>
MAYBE!!?? (as you've said many times) we're trying to make it
too complicated.
Maybe something as vanilla and simple as basic XML tag sets.
Every Open Source HealthCare Alliance Transaction Set might look
like this:
xmlns:"http://www.oshca.org"
<OSHCA-TS>
<demographics>
<name> </name>
<address>
<type> </type>
<text> </text>
</address>
<phone>
<type> </type>
<number> </number>
</phone>
</demographics>
<lab>
...
</lab>
<radiology>
...
</radiology>
...
</OSHCA-TS>
where ... is any other tags as needed.
You wouldn't have to get into it even being validated XML
although that would be a future goal.
Any app designed could be built to read/write these files. Kind
of like when almost everything could handle a .dbf
I know that some/all of the purists will get heartburn overthis
suggestion. But remember it's only the begining. Nothing stops us
from starting with this basic idea and building into a more
robust architecture.
-- Tim --
Open Source Health Care Alliance
Join us to help build solutions!
http://www.openhealth.com/en/healthcare.html
