Answering from a GNUmed perspective: > It's 4 Drs - 2 GP's a Staff grade & a consultant. Multi-user seeing the same patient over time. No problem.
> We would need to arrange appointments for pts - perhaps at 4 or more > sites, & see pts - ideally in a paper free environment. ... > Where to organise appointments from (one GP practice perhaps - riding > on the back of their appointment system?) I would suggest using KOrganizer alongside GNUmed to set up appointments. This is syncable. We do it (one staff/laptop only, however, no syncing required) with a physical therapy clinic which operates at two sites. > We might have different Drs working at different sites on different days. As they plan to use laptops - no problem. Do they have *concurrent* work going on ? If not they could just ONE laptop and share it. > Can we use a pre-existing GP clinical system on Portable laptops? Yes, one would think. > Could we sync the patient database so that a patient's record would be > accessible from ALL laptops? As another poster said: If the need for syncing can be avoided somehow that would be WAY easier to manage. Else it is tough luck, regarding GNUmed. > How would we back up the data on the laptops? We do daily database dumps on the laptop itself and scp that dump over to another machine whenever the laptop connects to homebase. > How secure would laptop data be (say within Isoft 's Synergy) if one > were lost. Pretty much not at all I fear. I'd suggest using application-external encryption. For GNUmed I'd suggest putting the database onto an encrypted partition and requiring manually entering the key before starting PostgreSQL. I would not do it during bootup so that the bad guy isn't hinted at the existence of encrypted data right away. Also it might hinder unattended booting. > What sorts of hoops should we expect to junp through regarding Data > protection, Caldicott guardian rules etc? Having a policy is likely better than not having one so why not taking a look at that. > Could we easily scan in drawings of lesions or Digital pics into a record. Yes, no problem with GNUmed. GNUmed would provider for SOAP style progress notes and a problem list. Scans/digi pics would be linked into the medically logical structure of the record. The problem list can be had at a granularity of "episode of illness" and "Foundational Health issue" - the latter of which is comprised of (possibly several of) the former. Not sure all this is helpful. It's just how I would attempt to go about things were I to setup this scenario. > How far have we progressed toward being able to say "get your generic IT > support staff (minimal) to download and set up this FLOSS software; On Debian Etch it is a) apt-get install gnumed-client for the client and b) wget gnumed-server.tgz c) redo-v2.sh to set up the server. > call this list of people/firms for second line support, Nope, no support available for GNUmed apart from the mailing list. Karsten -- GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD 4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346
