Adrian,
The objective of Distributed Collaborative Medicine, means in my view that we must look at the continuity of the global health of the patient.
Too many networks already exist, focusing on only one disease, diabetes, asthma, HIV, cancer, etc.....
However the fact is that a given patient may have more than one problem.
As a GP organisation, we begin with the coordination of a PATIENT CENTERED record, on secured régional servers, i.e. containing overviews of the central problem list and the complete care plan as far as possible.
Of course we need often the help of specialists
Therefore we begin with generic procedure for SERVICE REQUEST and allowing the involved partner to provide as soon as possible ANSWER or RESULTS on the regional server.
Usually one or more RESULTS should be returned in answer to a Service Request to any hospital specialist, what speciality it may be.
The same concepts can be applied to many kinds of request for services : to perform lab test, to prescribe drugs, to ask an admission in emergency, etc....
Begining with the requirements of general practice, some specialised features could be added later.
More information at
http://www.crisnet.be/index-uk.html
Etienne Saliez
tel ++ 32 26541759
Adrian Midgley wrote:
One area I think FLOSS particularly well-suited to is systems that cover an entire area, primary secondary and possibly patient access, for one disease area.Diabetes looks like a good starting one. Such a system should accept inputs that would be manual by default, but by defining an open interface information could be presented to it from the output of a module built by a commercial supplier for their own GP or hospital software. Natrually what those suppliers would like would b to bring the whole area onto their own system, and in due course write systems to handle other disease groups. but this should prove acceptable to them.
