(I hope you don't mind if I cross-post this to hardhats.)
I'd be interested in pursuing this idea further. If it's old news and I've
simply missed the discussion, I apologize. Unfortunately, things have been
so hectic with my current project that I've all but dropped out of
openhealth, I've stayed on the list, but have only been able to read a
fraction of the mail.
At any rate, what do you mean by "programming"? In your best of all possible
worlds, what would you like a physician to be able to do? Are you thinking
about defining the schema of the medical using visual tools? Building
reports? Logic to handle updates? Decision trees? What kind of view of the
data are you interested in? At the lowest level, it can be overwhelming, and
many details of the database schema are basically "infrastructure" designed
to suport what might be called the information or knowledge level view (as
opposed to pure data). Elements may exist for no reason but to support
logical relationships and not represent any "real world" object or
attribute. A lot can be done with "wizards" or "experts", tools that ask a
series of questions and generate code based on the responses given.
Object-oriented systems allow for "high level" operations, effectively
concealing many of the "low level" details of programming in more
traditional languages. However, it turns out that developing in
object-oriented environments turns out to be more challenging than
traditional procedural programming, and is quite a different skill. I think
a lot can be done in the are of writing code to analyze existing code or
designs, but we're still a long way for "automatic programming" for systems
of any complexity. This is actually an area that interest me greatly, and
look forward to hearing your ideas on the matter.
===
Gregory Woodhouse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
System Design & Development
+1 510 768 6862
-----Original Message-----
From: John S. Gage [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2001 9:29 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: Disenfranchised doctors
>But please, let's not go to the opposite
>extreme of concluding that all the necessary skills can be picked up in a
>few months, and that software professionals are really not needed in the
>healthcare arena.
They are. The question is: what tools can be created in software that
permit domain experts to do useful "programming". Obviously, these tools
will be created by professional programmers.
John
