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Open source software for developing world hospitals

hospitalrun.io

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Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#31

Post by lifeisstillgood »

datenwolf wrote: post #25
frabcus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling to understand the question - by testing for compliance like other software? I'm assuming there'd need to be a services business installing and maintaining the software, and adding improvements particular customers need.

> I'm struggling to understand the question - by testing for compliance like other software? Medical software is a different beast, compared to, say, your next online shop or bloggin plattform. Bugs in medical software can (and will) kill people. My work takes me to medical software development courses on a regular base and they usually consist of looking at the ways, medical software can kill people; sadly often eno…

From my perspective, this is not "don't use FOSS in medical situations" but "ensure the SDLC and code base meet requirements"

Unless we are talking foolish regulation, FOSS backed by taxpayer development money is likely to produce better and more open, transparent and testable code than proprietary companies competing against each other.

Government regulation perhaps should focus on building automated test suites as a first high level bar.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#32

Post by zkirill »

dublinclontarf wrote: post #29
Maarten88 wrote: post #19

This is a great initiative, I logged in the beta and tried a few things, which mostly worked, although somewhat slow. Probably a lot of hospital administrators active now :-) What surprised me most is that the UI does not seem to be mobile responsive, and does not work well on smartphones. I would have guessed that in developing countries mobile use would be hugely important?

Are they likely to have smart-phones to use?

I think they might be more likely to have a smartphone than a desktop or laptop computer.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#33

Post by daleharvey »

martijn_himself wrote: post #18
daleharvey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how far along their implementation of the 'off-line first' sync mechanism is, this is a non-trivial thing to implement. The are using PouchDB + CouchDB for offline first / syncing which is how I came to notice it (I am a maintainer for PouchDB). So their ability to sync should be reliable and well tested and if not then its bugs for us to fix :)

That is great :) As a complete newbie on the subject- does the offline caching use HTML5 browser storage or something like that? I can imagine there may be a limit on the amount of data that can be stored? It's not unusual for an internet connection to be cut out an entire day :)

PouchDB uses indexedDB under the hood, falling back to webSQL when needed and its possible to plug in localStorage / memory / other adapters.

As for limits, desktop browsers are generally 'unlimited' mobile browsers can be stricter and often people use wrapper projects (like cordova etc) to get round that and have unlimited storage.

http://pouchdb.com/faq.html#data_limits http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota-researc...

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#34

Post by willholley »

datenwolf wrote: post #26
seren wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And often the compliance also defined how the SW should have been developed. For example, for devices : ISO IEC 62304 Medical device software – Software life cycle processes I guess this kind to enforce on an Open Source projects with "open contributions".

Actually this has been transferred into the ISO 80xxx sections. Specifically 80001 and following.

possibly this has changed recently but I don't think medical records software is subject to the same standards as medical device software (in Europe, at least).

It's important to remember that EMRs are there to support healthcare professionals who are used to working with incomplete / incorrect information all the time. For example, a patient isn't going to have a drug dispensed to them without a pharmacist checking it (and, frequently, asking the prescribing doctor to clarify/amend questionable doses or instructions).

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#36

Post by castell »

morelikeborelax wrote: post #15
mavhc wrote: post #7

Looks like it's way more open source than the two "open source" school MIS systems I looked at, one had no code available, the other an old version dumped on github, but not linked from their main page until you signed up.

Could you link to them please as I work at an MIS company that moved from open to closed source and wondering if our old codebase is still out there. This project looks good, but it does remind me of the issues with management systems for public services. With the level of requests we deal with from school users that "need" features to satisfy management/governors/government it makes it very hard to do open source an…

You seem not to understand what open source means. Code released to the public under common free open source licenses mean someone can fork the code and put it on Github any time. If the company chooses to close source further development, then it's their unfortunate choice, nevertheless already released older open sourced code will stay open source.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#37

Post by diptanu »

How does this compare to OpenMRS? Hospitals because they have to obey a lot of goverment regulations needs to customize a lot of things, records and reporting so we did a lot of work around the plugin architecture in OpenMRS, does this have similar extension mechanisms too?

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#38

Post by kriro »

datenwolf wrote: post #25
frabcus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling to understand the question - by testing for compliance like other software? I'm assuming there'd need to be a services business installing and maintaining the software, and adding improvements particular customers need.

> I'm struggling to understand the question - by testing for compliance like other software? Medical software is a different beast, compared to, say, your next online shop or bloggin plattform. Bugs in medical software can (and will) kill people. My work takes me to medical software development courses on a regular base and they usually consist of looking at the ways, medical software can kill people; sadly often eno…

As far as I can tell it's mostly a hospital ERP targeted at making the administrative tasks easier. Regulations should not affect that as much (apart from your typical HR regulations etc. coupled with stronger privacy enforcement in this domain).

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#40

Post by paulojreis »

I'd be very, very happy to contribute to this.

It seems you have a nice focus in usability - efficacy, efficiency and satisfaction. For me, it seems vital to make IT useful and not a burden, reducing clinicians wasted time on non-clinical duties and their general distaste with the software they have to use. I'm a UX PhD, I have experience working with very particular groups of users, and I would be very motivated in working for better healthcare.

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