I like very much the 10 statements of Azeem MAJEED about the needs for informatics in Primary Care.
Our project pay particular attention to the point 4, about sharing information between all the care providers in charge of the same patient and the coordiantion role of the GP. This by means of very secured serevers.
Moreover in my view it is more practical just to share information, than to send many messages from one sender to one receiver.
see :
http://www.crisnet.be/index-uk.html
In reaction to the point of Tim CHURCHES, I do well agree with the point 8 about the need of external professional IT support in small medical practices.
A realistic approach is indeed to centralize technical support, but only at a regional level,
In some situations it remains necessary to to send a person on the site. Therefore the range of action of a regional support center should be lees than 100 Km.
Data bases should be distributed in regional centers, under control of regional medical organisations.
Do not forget also that > 95 % of the patient care occur within a distance of less than 100 Km from the patient's home.
Normally most of the work can be done from a remote location on a secured server, and sometimes by means of the automatic downloads of components.
Well OK for regional server and support services, but about software developements we do not have the resources everywhere, in every little town and we have similar needs in many countries.
For software developements we need a much broader scale, i.e.much more international collaborations.
Therefore our Open Source approach.
Our GP organisation in Belgium begin to provide IT services (installation, support, maintenance, coordination, ...), but we use Open Source tools as far as possible, and we do not ask royalties anymore on our additional developments.
Etienne Saliez, MD
clos des Pommiers 4
B-1310 La Hulpe
Belgium
tel ++ 32 26541759
preferred Email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Tim Churches wrote:
There is an excellent article in today's BMJ on what the NHS should do to improve primary care informatics in Britain - see http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/326/7382/202
I agree with all of the points except number 8 - not so sure that centralised storage of data is a good idea, at least not without very good cryptographic protection to prevent the centralised system admins (or anyone else) getting access to practices' data.
Tim C
