Once again this is simply a question of MIME types. The MIME type triggers the application...even today.
But more particularly I believe you have mixed together things that shouldn't be mixed together below. "Using" and "viewing" are easily accomplished with e-mail clients: "show me the last ten days lab data on Mrs. Jones" is easily done with existing e-mail software.
But then you talk about "searching" in the same breath. To me, "searching" implies SQL queries or something very similar. Clinicians simply do *not* perform these sorts of data mining activities in their practice. The whole idea of "give me all the patients over fifty who chem gum and wear cotton slacks" does not exist in clinical medicine. Yes, this sort of thing must be accomplished with standard RDBMS tools, but that does not have anything to do with clinical medicine.
John
John, while I agree that email can act as a rather convenient way of putting progress notes and other data into the system I haven't yet seen the email client that's particularily suited for *handling* EHR data (searching, using, viewing, etc.).Regards, Karsten -- GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD 4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346
