Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
This one time, at band camp, David Guest wrote:
The format for this data is undocumented but should not be too difficult
to decipher. It changes from time to time so you are playing samba to
HCN's Microsoft.
Making assumptions about data, especially something as important to a
business as billing data, is fraught with danger.
For all their foibles, the UK's National Programme for IT (the
_enormous_ and mostly disastrous IT programme of the NHS) started
specifically by defining data formats and open interchange, the idea
being that they can chop and change suppliers if necessary. That
really should be the starting point here too.
There are a few different aspects...the Medicare rebate, credit card
payments, health insurance claims, the patient's medical
information and practice accounting stuff. This would involve
integration with
the Tax office, Medicare Office. There is also an aspect of managing
patient
medical information.
There is some info about the NSW E-Health record project, yes NSW
not VIC, here:
<http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/index.php?env=-categories:m2120-1-1-8-s-0&reset=1>
Note NSW are not advertising the performance or not of their E-Health
project.
All the existing software has had 20 years of slowly expanding from a
practiced based accounting software, to include appointmernts, practice
management, interfaces with outside organisations like ATO and Medicare,
within practice LAN, then remote WAN then packages of lookup
information, prescribing packages, pathology reporting, radiology image
viewing and medical records.
Security and user priveledge levels should be in there and soon to come
will be interface with some smart card of portable patient information.
The existing players have had a long and painful growth with much that
didn't work well for some time, despite it being a market that would pay
for quality.
A FOSS solution would have to start where the others are now, a big
step, but if it allowed a way out of vendor lock in it could gain a space.
Ken
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