Karsten, Remember that this is a very small country (250,000 people) - just a little big bigger than one of our sub-districts here in South Africa (we have 250 of them). For a population as small as that you can use nearly any dbms.
Read the article - considerable hype and early in the process, and I don't believe for a second that it's gonna be as easy as the company makes it out. It is also not clear what the real scope of it is (PHC/secondary/tertiary etc). Nevertheless, it's a positive development - FOSS is moving ahead, but whereas you might have expected the uptake to be much higher in developing countries it is not as easy as that. Most developing countries are already 98% Microsoft (often based on widespread piracy, so there's little economic incentive in moving to FOSS), and re-training the few computer literate people in a situation with very few trainers (almost none with FOSS skills) is a major threshold. Donor influence also play a role - most donors give tied aid and expect their own commercial companies to transfer the funding back to country of origin. The Health (Management) Information Systems Programme I'm working with now covers wholly or partially countries/states with around 200 mill people. We are moving towards DBMS independence for our solutions, but MySQL at the moment seems to be the logical FOSS option (many states/provinces are already using ORACLE, MS SQL or DB2, so it obviously makes sense for them to host health data in the same DBMS). We have been "sniffing" at MaxDB (formerly SAPdb), but it seems like a very complicated DBMS. Obviously, HMIS systems have less data (a few million records, usually) than EPR systems. Regards calle ********************************************* Calle Hedberg 46D Alma Road, 7700 Rosebank, SOUTH AFRICA Tel/fax (home): +27-21-685-6472; Cell: +27-82-853-5352 ********************************************* Subject: Re: Complete country-wide open source medical systems installation in 90 days > > The article doesn't name what open source health care software they are > > using, it just mentions some of the products in software stack; "The system > > is based on free open-source software such as Java, Tomcat, MySQL and > > Apache" > Now, this is going to sound arrogant but if they build the > foundation of an entire country's health IT infrastructure > upon the strength of MySQL I am going to say "No, thanks". > > However, more power to them. > > Karsten > -- > GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net > E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD 4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346 > > >
