Re: [Gnumed-devel] modules to develop

[Ian Haywood]

On Sat, Oct 09, 2004 at 10:36:05AM +1000, scaredycat wrote:
> this is another re-invent wheel module that might be useful:
> pop3 protocol is fairly simple, and gpg is easily available on linux 
> systems.
> has anyone done a module to connect to a mailbox , scan for certain mail 
> headers and
> RETRieve mail, and decrypt gpg ecrypted / signed mail contents, for getting
> a document to import into the document table?
> - having delusions about this , when sending encrypted mail to myself , 
> having recently installed
Yes, there are high-level modules for all of this, including talking 
to GPG (http://gopher.quux.org:70/devel/pyme/SVN/doc/pyme.core.html),
a daemon to do this in the background would be a good miniproject,
as has previously been alluded to. IMHO the GUI should present a single
Inbox for all new documents/results irrespective of how they come into
the system.

However without a messaging standard it's not very useful: there's
no way to automatically match the incoming documents to patients,
this needs to be done by hand, in which case you might as well buy a
faxmodem, and have a listener daemon which recieves the call and import faxes
directly into the document repository, as well as sending documents
marked for transmission. [another good miniproject?]

Another problem is many specialists, radiologists, here actively don't 
want electronic referrals.
(For the non-Aussies: because it generates a legal
duty to follow up patients who don't show up.) 

This is not trivial: my hospital employs a full-time clerk to chase
up patients who don't show for outpatients bookings, obviously no
private entity can entertain such insanity.

One solution may be to print an opaque URL on the bottom of the 
paper referral letter,
like "syantan.gp.com.au/referrals/xfgjf57djskf", the code acts as a "password" 
which the specialist can use to download
an electronic version of the referral through the gnumed web interface
(for populating her own EHR)
when/if the patient fronts up, and then submit back an electronic report
using a web form (which is what we really want, at the end of the day)


Ian

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