Andrew Ho wrote: >On Sat, 20 Dec 2003, Jim Self wrote: > >> I think most of your examples will very likely work to recommend in >> favor of VistA and MUMPS if they are explored in depth. > >Jim, > You are a MUMPS expert since your web page says you work on VMACS >(Veterinary Medical and Administrative Computer System) > [http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/compsrv.htm#vmacs]. > >So, maybe you are willing to help us explore VMACS and MUMPS in greater >depth:
Andrew, Thanks for taking the time to look. I will be glad to help. I think that MUMPS is vastly underappreciated by those who are not familiar with it and that it still has a great deal to offer for building robust and scalable information systems and particularly for deployment of such systems on the web. > 1) How easy would it be to modify VMACS to support human hospitals and >clinics? Why would you want to when you have a Free alternative with as well proven a record of large scale deployment as VistA? To modify VMACS to support some human hospitals and clinics might actually be doable but it would not be easy. It might be a better starting point than many alternatives, but to modify anything to provide comprehensive integrated support for a hospital (human or veterinary) at the level that VMACS provides for the VMTH at UC Davis would not be easy because hospitals are complex insitutions that are generally not well understood in depth by any of the people working in them. For human hospitals I am more interested at this point in helping with the Open Source VistA project. VistA is already deployed in hundreds of human hospitals. Systems derived from VistA are deployed in many hundreds more human hospitals and clinics. Therein lies a tremendous wealth of knowledge and proven viability. > 2) Can a bare VMACS instance be replicated and installed to >bare-harddrive in a few hours? We have very little experience yet in replicating VMACS. However, we have done it once recently. We are in the process of preparing to provide VMACS as a service to another Veterinary Teaching Hospital. After we have gone through the process a couple more times I expect that installing a new bare instance could easily fit under half an hour. This seems a strange question to ask about a hospital information system in that the effort or time involved in installing a bare system to harddrive is as nothing compared to other aspects of fitting or growing a system to fit its host institution. Furthermore, a bare system is not very useful. A great amount of data about hospital procedures, services, staff, clinicians, patients, schedules, lab tests, etc. must be entered before it would be very useful. > 3) How do you handle schema and workflow changes in VMACS? This question is too lacking in context for me to begin to answer. Are you thinking of anything specific? > >Thanks in advance, > >Andrew >--- >Andrew P. Ho, M.D. >OIO: Open Infrastructure for Outcomes >www.TxOutcome.Org > > --------------------------------------- Jim Self Chief Systems Developer and Manager VMTH Computer Services, UC Davis (http://www.vmth.ucdavis.edu/us/jaself)
