[Gnumed-devel] conference wrap-up

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi all,

GNUmed conference took place in Leipzig Germany today. We started roughly 9:30 
am and pretty much continued until 3:30pm with few short breaks.

The group consisted of 10 people. Apart from a representative of a local 
software support company and an network specialist there was one Debian 
packager, two physiotherapists and 5 physicians.

Karsten started off by introducing himself and announcing the schedule. I took 
over and provided an overview of GNUmed from a historical point of view. I 
cited oloh.net which demonstrates how GNUmed's codebase evolved (who 
contributed what and when), demonstrated GNUmed infrastructure (blog, wiki, 
download pages), demoed available installation packages for Windows and Linux 
and talked about LIve-DVD and friends.

This was followed by Karsten introducing GNUmed 1.2 (rc4) for about 60 
minutes. He basically came up with an imaginary patient and a visit in the 
practice and showed how to document health problems, allergies, lab data and 
much more. Finally an invoice was created to show off billing. This was will 
received and the people who were there stated that they were amazed how much 
GNUmed is capable of and how well it supports medical worksflows

I took over once again and demonstrated how GNUmed packages are prepared on 
MS-Windows and what is involved in keeping the up-to-date. I took the liberty 
to actually install the packages, to bootstrap a database and to show that the 
same client that was demonstrated on Linux was running right there in Windows. 
A short discussion came up on how to improve certain ares of the packages. All 
were valid points and will most likely be covered by future releases.

We had a short break which was largely used for discussions among the 
attending crowd.

Andreas from Debian-med continued the afternoon session by introducing Debian, 
Debian-med and how distributions try to interact with upstream (eg. GNUmed 
project members). He demonstrated that in Debian-med and in GNUmed there are 
various areas where people without coding abilities can make substantial 
contributions.

Stephan, a physiotherapist who has been using GNUmed for 5 years in live-mode 
gave an inspiring presentation on how GNUmed can be used in a physiotherapy 
practice. He elaborated on his finding as a user and told us that he is very 
happy with GNUmed and how efficiently any problem coming up is handled and 
corrected.

Just short of 4pm we briefly touched the issues webinterface, cloud based 
GNUmed and GNUmed on USB-drives.

All this talk about GNUmed really made us hungry so we wrapped up at the steak 
house around the corner. All people attending the mini-conference expressed 
their believe on GNUmed having great potential in Germany. I even think that 
GNUmed has even greater potential outside of Germany.

We wanted to show GNUmed interacting with FreeDiams but recent changes in 
FreeDiams did not allow for a full-blown demo. We briefly touched the issue of 
GNUmed's current non-availability on MacOS but stated that this was subject to 
change and does not have a technical but ressources-associated background.

All in all a nice and productive get-together which showed how far GNUmed has 
advanced. 

We did record a number of presentations but have yet to check out if the 
recorded material is of any usable quality.

Regards,
Sebastian Hilbert