On Monday 06 January 2003 13:49, Christian Heller wrote:
> > > The daemon would notionally be in two sections - the front end whcih is
> > > dependent upon the data structure passed to it,
I had in mind, notionally, a daemon consisting of a single executable which
would be made by joining together two sections of code.
One is written once and is the same wherever the daemon is to run, and
whatever medical record and prescription _generator_ is being used.
The other is written once for the UK (well, 1.2 times since Northern Ireland
has a different layout for prescriptions from England Wales and Scotland),
once for France, once for each State of the Union and so on.
But is unaffected by changes in the clincial reocrd system and prescription
generator.
Periodically there would for good reason be a change to the first part, that
part which receives the data input to this section of program code, and this
would be passed out to everyone, but would not occasion any change in
anyone's main medical programs, although presumably the users of one systme
said "let us have another field for passing through information on {I dunno}
to the eventual printed prescription or passed message.
Spasmodically and for administrative reasons there would be a change in the
layout demanded for a pritned prescription in some country, and this would be
written once for all systems that cared to use this daemon, but only be used
in that country. If it was really new it might produce a change - an
addition - to the data passed through the first part of the daemon, in which
case the rest of the world would get that as well, but only those systems
that needed to be used in the country in question would actually use and be
modified to satisfy.
I'd envisage, being a simple soul and having done this, the thing working by
watching a particular named directory, and whenever a file appeared in that
directory, reading the file, the part of the first part extracting the data
which would likely be XML, and the part of the second part laying it out in
the order demanded by the local powers temporal.
Then spiking the file, and periodically cleaning out the whole mess.
Why do it like this?
-----------------------------
Easy.
Widely applicable.
Extensible.
Licence hassles are minimised - the daemon can be GPL and the main clinical
system can be Hewlett(TM) Packard(R) Medicine for all we care.
Not only is it OS agnostic, it can run on a commodity box that isn't on the
same OS or indeed the same continent as the clincial system albeit I doubt it
would go further away than the local pharmacy round the corner. (using scp
or sftp for instance)
Is this a sensible open source component to envisage?
....................... and to suggest building and making available?
You tell me.
--
From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley
http://www.defoam.net/
