Quoting Dr Hugh Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I believe that Horst should be declared a national treasure and given > some medical assistants and a programming team. no arguments there. > However, as I don't have control over that, and even though I look > forward to getting to try using Gnumed and perhaps contributing in some > way, I find that my thoughts keep returning to OpenVista ( > http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista )- the FOI Public Domain ( is > that as good as GPL?) yes.
> practices using approved suppliers and supporters - all commonsense but > keeping people away from linux. The GUI front end could have been > ported from Delphi to Kylix on linux, but Borland have sold their soul > to Microsoft and Kylix has evaporated in the last 2 years. That's not the issue. It could still be ported to FreePascal if the code was available, but it's not: only the backend is open. The CPRS is a mized GUI/text interface, quite ugly, I don't think Aussie docs would accept it anyway. With gnumed the backend is nearly complete, it's the GUI and the linkages thereto which lag far, far behind, so switching to a another (admittedly fully complete and well-supported) backend doesn't get us very far. Additionally the MUMPS backend needs to be customised to Australian requirements, not a small undertaking, it would be faster (as the putative developers mostly know postgres but would have to learn MUMPS from scratch) to complete the gnumed backend. > > > I have been toying around the edges of Gnumed, but uneasy about > > committing a lot of effort, because progress appears to be stalled at > > present. Also I am still climbing the long learning curve to be able > > to contribute. It is probably the nearest to a viable FOSS app around, > > and could form the core of further development. > > Having studied the characteristics of "successful open source" on > > Google it seems that you need something tangible to gather a core of > > volunteer developers around. Indeed, that's been the big problem: a minimal working system around which people can write plugins. Problem is a "minimal working system" for an EHR is hard to define (this want I was trying to draw out of David) and probably quite a lot of work (more than most FOSS projects) even at it's most minimal. > > The other aspect of feasibility is the requirement for ongoing > > maintenance of data in prescribing, billing, vaccinations, travel etc. > > This would require a major effort and I dont think could be done on a > > voluntary basis - maybe this would be the basis for a commercial > > model, as well as technical support IMHO that's actually the easy part, I think it could be maintained by volunteers. It's easy to "parallelise": give lots of little tasks to many people, and the main qualification is MBBS, which we all have, not BCompSci, which we don't, and is the main problem at present. Ian _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
