A) Obviously, anyone who wants to respond should.
B) I am going to respond at length later today.
John
At 01:17 PM 5/11/01, Woodhouse, Gregory J. wrote:
>(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
