[Gnumed-devel] medibase

[sjtan]

Sorry for posting here, but really don't want to get too involved in
gpcg, just like talking to (? at) other developers. 

Medibase looks like it has taken a look at the MD and Genie interfaces,
and reimplemented their best UI ideas. 

Input Output seems to be clearly separated ? a good idea ?
To input, the large buttons have to be pressed, but looks like the 
author really likes clear partitioning : each button is a major use
case : for instance, 
 PATIENT : select a patient or edit patient demographic details
 PRESCRIBE: prescribe drugs 
 EXAM : enter gui assisted , structured examination findings.
 LETTERS, write a letter
 DOCS : scan in documents
 REQUESTS: enter single Dialog for combined radiology pathology
ordering.
 IMMUNIZATIONS: enter immunizations given

 
The only default major use case is the progress notes, which occupies a 
sub-panel on the upper-left.

Autotext is like Genie : i.e. text substitution for character sequences
which are created by the user: not really for Domain specific structured
clinical entry, but as time-saving facility.

I wasn't able to try out the prescribing wizard, because the subset 
commercial drug database was corrupted ( according to error message).

The rest of the UI is pretty read only, and looks mostly like database
table views. 

Can't actually remember how one re-edits items, eg. letters,
immunizations, will need to go back.

I was wondering if Horst got Interbase to work from a unix server, and
the medibase client to work in Wine , and his impressions?


My impression is that the backend tables aren't too complicated, and
there is no object model. 
 
 The idea of having a EHR future-proof model is like retro fashion : I
was reading that Codd died recently, and the obituary said he simplified
data storage by creating Relational algebra and RDBMS theory , when
previously there tended to be things like network databases , which
required a lot of work to write queries apparently ( some sort of
implementation dependency ,I think). Network databases look a little
like object models, which hang data and operations together , and mean
programming for each data concept. 

Regarding the developer's claim about the difficulty implementing it, 
(he did say that the software writing was only a small percentage of
total development ), 
I'm not sure if the application was that hard to make: Delphi is
popular  because one can knock up a database GUI frontends really
quickly without much coding, and delphi is integrated with interbase
and , the professional version even comes with an express InstallShield 
packager. The 3rd party drug database was developed by Mims: not sure if
it is just a module with a DDE like interface ( DDE is like RPC [remote
procedure call] to unix systems, I gather, last time I looked in 1995 !
:(
 Maybe not quite, RPC can be accessed from one machine to another,
whereas DDE is mainly inter-process procedure calling within the same
machine. ) 

I was thinking about how he might have managed to create exporting of 
patient clinical information from MD, the major gp clinical app  in
Aust.                                       
  the MD at work has a sql query interface which allows the viewer 
to look at data, but not to output it to a file. It does however have
a DDE interface which can be called on to Select a patient record by
ID, and to return various components of the medical record by patient
id. This could be combined with the fact that MD allows exporting of
demographic details, which might contain the patient id  
(or maybe there is "a list patient ids"  DDE function ). A little
program could be created that gets the MD data by iterating over
patient ids and calling each DDE extract function. Of course, it would 
need to be written in a windows API compatible language, which 
Cygwin with gcc can do at low cost.  Has anyone looked into it already?
 
looking at the prices, medibase seems quite low cost, and might be aimed
at the small practice looking to comply with Aust Practice incentive
funding , whereas profile which costs several grand and ten times more,
might be suited to the corporatized gp  BTW has anyone done a
non-advocate review of Profile?