On Wednesday 07 March 2001 01:13, E. H. \(Eric\) Fletcher wrote: > I think one big problem with the paper system is the erosion of the > integrity of the filing system over the years as documents are removed and > replaced. In practice most of the offices we deal with find that they > suffer from a lot of mis-filing over the years. Some hospitals have a > document check-in/check-out process as well as staff dedicated to > maintaining the filing system. This may improve the situation. I just discovered a paper on CSCW - "Computer Supported Cooperative Work", which can be found at the Technical University of Munic (German only): http://www11.in.tum.de/lehre/vorlesungen/ws2000-01/cscw/index_4.html It partly describes the basics of a research project called BSCW - "Basic Support for Cooperative Work" that was run by GMD http://bscw.gmd.de, a German research organization and is now distributed commercially by OrbiTeam http://www.orbiteam.de The aims of that software system are (in my translation): - Manage common group workspaces over Internet - Save and retrieve documents over WebBrowser (supports Postscript, Latex, PDF, Word etc. but doesn't interpret documents) - Integrate an event mechanism for notification of group members on change of the common workspace - Integrate discussion groups and planning of meetings Basic components are: - Structural Components: workspace, folder (every user gets one or more workspaces; a workspace contains a hierarchical structure of folders containing objects) - Content Objects: document, link, article, meeting (documents are files on the server whose content can be of any MIME compliant type; links can also point to other servers...) - Information on Objects (every object has an icon that shows its kind, name and icons for events; additionally a description of the object and its possible actions are shown; clicking an Info button opens a page with detailed access right information) - Version Management for Documents: (possible evolution of documents; an implicit folder is created that can contain any number of numbered versions; opening a document opens the last version; alternatively, the folder can be opened to have access to all versions; new versions are created explicitely) - Article as part of a linear Discussion (similar to news groups; article implemented as special kind of folder that contains answers) - Operations on Objects: save, delete, retrieve, rename documents/articles, add new group members, send email to one/all (operations possible for one or many objects; dependency on access rights) 1 Does somebody have experiences with such systems? (I think they are also called ContentManagement Systems, right? GroupWare like LotusNotes/Domino seems to be part of it.) 2 Could it be a solution for storing EHR documents and related files? 3 Would it be useable to replace a database then - as such a document server is some kind of database itself? 4 It would be easy. Every patient having an own sub tree with documents that are stored in a well defined structure and could link to other servers. Thanks for comments, -- Kind regards, Christian http://www.openemed.org http://www.resmedicinae.org - Information in Medicine -
