[Gnumed-devel] Gnumed in real life

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi !

I felt the following is necessary to give Gnumed a direction.
Gnumed is not a just for fun project.

It's huge. It's supposed to do everything - some time
That's a common misperception.

Are there any real-life usecases ?
You bet. A few words on the background.
Here in Germany we have a commercial MS-DOS based practice management software 
called Turbomed. Turbomed worked well for many years. A year ago the Company 
that codes this app came up with a Windows version. They suddenly lost all 
interest in the DOS-version. This leads to a number of problems.

1.) Memory problems - There is not enough memory to call external apps the way 
we used to for many years. They don't care
2.) Lab-data associated with patients disappear the moment you view them 
inside Turbomed.
3.) Sometimes one cannot access the lab-data sheet in Turbomed at all because 
of corrupted data. This is a Turbomed problem and has been there for a while.

What options do we and many physicians over here have ?
1.) Upgrade to Windows-version. This sucks because we would have to upgrade 
our hardware, train our personel on Windows and still work with a slower 
software

2.) Use DOSemu under Linux. This works but has some drawbacks since we need to 
access a chipcard-keyboard directly which does not work from within DOSemu

3.) Use GNUmed. That means parts of GNUmed. Karsten has explained the remote 
control feature before. We stay on Windows98 , run an GNUmed instance in the 
background and use it in conjunction with Turbomed. 

3.1)We intend to import lab-data into GNUmed instead of Turbomed. This way it 
will never get lost again. 

3.2)We also use the document archive from within GNUmed. All paper documents 
coming in by mail get scanned with an image scanner and associated with the 
corresponding patient  

3.3) We record vaccinations in GNUmed because many people loose their 
documents and even hospitals call to check on the vaccination status.
Until now we did this non-natively in Turbomed.

Anyway. As you can see there is an immediate need for Gnumed right now

-- 
Sebastian Hilbert 
Leipzig / Germany
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