Adrian Midgley wrote:
>
> > Bringing the topic back to wider Healthcare issues, has anyone experimented
> > with "issue-tracking" software in a healthcare setting? I'm wondering if it
> > would make a useful tool for tracking patient enquiries, feeding them to
> > the correct staff-member, tracking progress.... ?
>
> It would be saleable to LMCs (UK family practice's local political
> orgnaisations) in my view. We tried CIX, are looking at Wiki, but a sort of
> bugzilla could be very very useful.
We have recently completed a systems analysis and drawn up functional
specifications for an issues management system for Public Health Units
[PHUs](which deal with population health issues such as communicable
disease control, environmental health, health promotion, epidemiology
etc - and not the provision of publically-funded primary health care as
the names seems to suggest to many people from North America). PHUs are
equivalent to county health departments in the US. The report will be
published in PDF form in the next month or so - I'll post a notice on
this list when it is out.
We considered a Wiki, but informal focus group testing in two PHUs
suggested that Wikis were a bit too unstructured (or rather the
structuring capabilities through hyperlinking was a bit too abstract)
for most users. Also, an email as well as a Web interface was considered
desirable.
We also began to evaluate SupportWizard, which is Web/email software
support system built with Perl and MySQL. The underlying database schema
can be reconfigured via a Web interface. However, it is a commerical
product (despite its open source underpinnings), and its publishers
hiked the price fourfold just after we began the evaluation, which put
it beyond our means. That's why I'm so interested in Roundup, which
apart from being free, has a more elegant design than SupportWizard.
However, Roundup still needs more work before it is ready for production
use in PHUs - we are seriously considering engaging commercial Python
contractors to work on it for us. However, I think it is fine as-is for
a medical/Python discussion group.
Other uses of Roundup-like systems in healthcare: (sporadic) event
reporting systems eg disaster management (which overlaps with public
health issue management), adverse event reporting (eg deaths/near-misses
under anaesthesia, medication errors), public relations management.
Common to all such systems is a) the need to be able to report something
and attach variable amounts of unstructured or lightly structured
information to the report; b) the ability to involve a variable group
people to deal with the followup of each event; c) the ability to expand
or contract the involved group easily as the issue/event blows up or
settles down; d) tight access control and security (Roundup is currently
deficient in this respect); e) teh ability to extract aggegrate
statistics for management reporting, annual reports ("This year we
averted 267 public health crises...").
The real challenge is integration with PDAs - in particular with
PalmPilots. We could find any satisfactory open-source solution for
this, apart from using email as the interface.
Tim C
