On Monday 16 June 2003 23:56, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > While I am not a technical guru, I do have a very busy > private practice in Family Medicine that is not funded by > anyone except myself and what I can generate out of the > practice.
Me also. > I recently was forced to switch a working program to > another vendor The loss of service from a proprietary system and company due to commercial events was what convinced m that Open Source is a necessary but not of itself sufficient condition for satisfactory IT service to family practices, and by extension to tertiary services and patients. I termed it "Ars Longa, IT Brevis" and occasionally mention it. This in my view is a sufficient argument in itself for changing from proprietary systems; resisting or delaying the introdduction of proprietary systems in un-automated establishments; accepting rudimentary FLOSS systems which only address half the the requirements of a specification. In producing systems that are intended to persist it is desirable that a theoretical description and understanding exists, and over a long time-scale and in areas such as the movement of patients and components of their records from one system to another this should eventually produce a large payback (tending toward the difference between n**2 and 2n in a world of n systems or at least the cost of retyping every item in every incoming medical record and the value of lost or altered data in that process) At the same time, medicine is an intensely pragmatic discipline and business, and the great bulk of work can be handled as individual jobs. Software that handles a common process - call for immunisation, record immunisation, claim payment for immunisation, throw off statistics about immunisation, handle the knowledge service for immunisation - can be very useful. The tech challenge is to write such a piece of process automation without backing everyone else into a corner of having to use the same perhaps incomplete theoretical model to the detriment of eg the handling of decision support on ordering (or as we say "requesting") a computer tomogram of a head... > What I would appreciate from this list Is not actually the charter of this list. You asked for ways to cope better with the present situation of ownership and inaccessibility of automation, whereas we are committed to replacing that with a situation where you might well diffuse your 3 year search into a constant need to sponsor awareness of developments, but there would be no sudden discontinuities, and in the last analysis when your supplier went feet-up you could not be prevented from paying for modifications next time your government required them. -- From the Linux sofa or garden swing of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/
