This is as good a place to submit these comments to the group as any.
Paper has two overwhelming advantages in medical care:
ONE) it's "screen resolution" is at least 600 dots per inch these days
(I can get an entire anesthesia record on 8 1/2 X 11 piece of paper,
*not* on a CRT),
TWO) doctors are used to it (they aren't ivory tower programmers, they
poor helpless slobs who are inundated by crap)
So, in order for EMR to get into the mainstream it must have
sophisticated print facilities to, first of all, mimic the current
record, and second of all to bring doctors along.
In this vein, I was absolutely fascinated to see that Intuit had put
TurboTax on the net. Fill out your taxes on-line. Sort of sounds like
what we're trying to do. But how did they handle printing all those
funky forms? I was really eager to find out. Well, they use pdf, which
is pretty smart.
What are the open source facilities for generating pdf documents, and
why isn't there an X server for printers?
John
Horst Herb wrote:
>
> > It's easy Dave, all that is needed is for one to have spent his/her years during
> > the RPC -> ORB revolution (with deaths such as ATLAS on the way) doing software
> > engineering! Ooops.....
> >
> > The Edwards/Orfali books aren't bad, despite the silly Martians all over the
> > place, but their technical content is quite good.
>
> I don't want to be rude, and I love to hold a book in my hands, but I believe that
>if you don't / can't publish a "standard" (or whatever) in a clearly understandable &
>complete form _online_ , you are lost.
>
> Nowadays, in these very fast developing times, I don't buy books any more to get
>known with a topic. I "learn" the basics on the net, and if I consider it worth
>knowing, I might shop for a book on this topic just for the pure joy of reading it in
>the bathtub (definitely beats taking the monitor to the spa). I know that most fellow
>developers do the same. There are exceptions, but they are very rare.
>
> Ivory tower programmers who still believe in papers and books as _primary_ (or even
>unique) distribution channel of knowledge have lost contact to reality.
>
> Horst
