John, > But more particularly I believe you have mixed together things that > shouldn't be mixed together below. "Using" and "viewing" are easily > accomplished with e-mail clients: "show me the last ten days lab data > on Mrs. Jones" is easily done with existing e-mail software. I want my EMR client to always show me the last 5 blood glucose/HbA1c levels. I want it to remind me that this patient is allergic to Parabene when I write a script. I want it to automatically remember and re-use data on the job of the patient when I treat her for a work-related injury. I don't see how MIME types will help much here. Neither do "normal" e-mail clients.
> Clinicians simply do *not* perform these sorts of data mining > activities in their practice. "Give me the last mention of tetanus immunisation status anywhere in this patient's EMR." i.e. "Give me the most recent occurrence of 'tet.' or 'Td'." Admittedly this can be done with grep, too. Regards, Karsten -- GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD 4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346
