At 18:27 08/03/00 +0000, you wrote:
>With Dr Ballester's permission I have cross-posted this to the
>openhealth list since I believe that his thoughts are appropriate
Tim, there must be millions of Ballesters out there!
Here are some of my thoughts:
1. The health professionals education system is in a flux/transition. The
graduates of 2010 will be more adept with computer science than the
graduates lastyear. At the same time, they know their own workflow enough
to design their own (proprietary-design, open source built) EMR. This is
where I see things are going. How about the others in the list? Do you see
the future differently?
2. Come to think of it, even the healthcare disciplne is being swamped by
the open source ideology. In 1950, my dad was a walking blackbox...pulling
ampoules from his bag and injecting them in children. The expected effect
was cure. If some kids worsened, no one had enough knowledge to raise a
hoot. But now, medical knowledge is "open source" (www.clinicaltrials.gov
for example). Even medicine is in transition.
3. In fact, every aspect of life seems to be in transition since there is
rarely a domain that is not information dependent.
We all agree that open source, as a method, is a good thing. But we cannot
agree on how this good thing should be incarnated for health.
I vote that we develop tools along with the applications. Tools that are
simple enough to be adopted by any open source EMR. "Applications" designed
for a particular environment just have too much "proprietary" knowledge
embedded to be portable across clinics.
alvin
PS. A good example of a tool would be the appointment-scheduling system.
FreeMed has one....
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Alvin B. Marcelo, M.D.
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