Re: [Gnumed-devel] Fwd: [openhealth] Demonstrations & Standards.

[Tim Churches]

Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2006 at 01:26:38PM +0800, Syan Tan wrote:
> 
>> maybe if we did a script that produces randomly "simulated" records and put
>> them into gnumed
> ...
>> then demonstrate how scalable and practical, minimally functional, an open
>> source medical solution
>> even something in alpha like gnumed can be.
> 
> Sounds like a good project to me !

An excellent source of sex-specific given names and surname can be found
at http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/names_files.html - obviously
these are representative of the US population, but that's a reasonable
place to start. By using the frequencies when selecting names randomly,
you can even approximate the distribution of names in the US population
(which is important for testing things like patient lookup systems). Of
course, the joint distribution of given names and surnames is not
provided, so such a simulation will have it limits, but it is a
reasonable pace to start.

Tim C

Aside to James: we should use these lists for further volume/concurrency
testing of NetEpi, rather than the lists I used previously from the
Australian telephone book listings - so there can be no confusion with
real people (not in any way suggesting that Americans are not real people).

TC