Re: [Gnumed-devel] When & where to present GNUmed e.g. IEEE Symposium? Role of "Papers"?

[J Busser]

> The major barriers between Gnumed and widespread use (at least in 
> Australia) are  the lack of a prescribing module and the lack of an 
> integrated appointments/accounting system

All of this is very do-able, it really comes down to what amount of 
collaborative effort can be assembled by the "GNUmed community". I am 
happy to help with defining some needs and functional design, but it 
is the area of coding that I imagine that we need the most help, and 
that will only come from growing the community.

And unless it is possible to pull donors and investors out of the 
woodwork, the way forward could be to coax people to use GNUmed as a 
partial solution, postponing the other big pieces until a critical 
mass of *actual* users is developed.

For example if you already register patients in a satisfactory 
scheduling and billing program it is possible to "push" the patient's 
registration information into GNUmed (or to switch to GNUmed and 
"pull" it in) and then conduct your clinical work inside GNUmed.

So I would suggest the supporters of GNUmed, inside each country, 
identify a commercial vendor that is willing to let its own partial 
solution (scheduling and billing) inter-operate with GNUmed.

re prescribing:

A proven approach has been taken by OSCAR McMaster which, for 
prescribing, deployed an instance (correct term?) of drugref and 
after populating it with a Canadian inventory of drugs, wrote hooks 
from OSCAR for prescription-writing.

So with a suitable prescribing module, installations of GNUmed in 
Canada could share access to that same server. One drugref server per 
country might serve the needs of multiple clinics using different OSS 
EMRs. Load, rather than distance, may be the determining factor 
because I know an OSCAR site in my province of British Columbia that 
accesses a drugref server at distance of two thousand miles without 
usability complaints.

For Australia, Richard Terry had reported on-list (see the archive) 
special permission having been obtained from an Australian company 
(or branch) to allow their drug inventory to reside in drugref, at 
least for the GNUmed project, on at least a trial basis. But I do not 
know where it stands.

re appointments:

I know someone working on another OSS project (not OSCAR) who knows 
David Chan, and who is interested to determine from David what are 
his views about that code being borrowed and redeployed inside other 
GPLd projects.

re accounting:

This is maybe usefully divisible into patient service (medical 
services)-based accounting which can involve the electronic 
submission of claims to paying organizations, versus more 
general-purpose accounting for the medical practice that can inform 
the tracking and ordering of supplies in addition to managing the 
office expenses and payroll. Maybe also invoicing for clinical work 
or consulting that is not accessible through electronic claims 
submission. For the first area, there had been discussion of trying 
to use freeb but I believe freeb may have  (at least its originator 
has) been absorbed into a commercial company. I had assembled some 
background notes that reside on the wiki. For the second area people 
have proposed SQL-Ledger but they could certainly use an off the 
shelf package.