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Open source software for developing world hospitals

hospitalrun.io

41–50 of 119 posts

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#41

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?

Or tablets. They are wipe-clean. Keyboards are a "germ" nightmare.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#44
Sorry another story about my journey with my son while he battled cancer.

Closed Proprietary image formats and systems HURTS patients. We used the local hospital for Chemo and everything else at the Children's Hospital 1.5 hours away for his legs and lungs. I would always have to wait 20-30 minutes to get a DVD of the studies (PET, CT Scan or MRI even ultrasound, but those are worthless) and then bring them to the doctor. The doctor would be forced to use whatever the portable image viewing program that came on the DVD and then they had to be sent to the IT Department to be imported into their system.

We would be there to remove some horrible tumor but before half his surgeries (I can't count how many surgeries he had) we would have to go in the day before (3 hour round trip) to get the expensive scan done again. One time I had a scan at 11 PM - Midnight and then drive home around 2 AM and be back at the hospital at 7 AM check in for a 10 hour surgery. ALL BECAUSE THE FORMATS ARE CLOSED and SYSTEMS could not connect so that my son's records were all the same every where. I carried 20 DVDs with me all the time just in case.

In case you are wondering my son unfortunately passed away after almost 5 years of fighting. If you are ever interested in giving to a cancer society please consider stbaldricks.org. Most charities give 0% or 2% to pediatric research and that is why we went over 20 years without a new chemo for children till last year, which St Baldrick's funded the research for this amazing new drug to fight a different type of cancer my son did not have.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#45

That reminded me about story my friend told me some time ago. He's IT specialist in hospital, they were having some problems with x-ray machine with server based on windows XP and thin clients as viewing stations. Eventually it was replaced with debian based workstations and haven't look back ever since. After this he told me about interesting case with it, there was patient complaining about middle foot pains, on pr…

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Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#46

At quick glance this seems to be fantastic! Software like this is what brings out the great nature of open source. This project reminds me of the eye tracking system that gained popularity a few weeks ago. EDIT: Here's a link to the referred to project https://github.com/OptiKey/OptiKey/wiki

That was the first thing that came to my mind after reading this. I was at reddit when the author of OptiKey posted it, the responses were amazing.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#48

That reminded me about story my friend told me some time ago. He's IT specialist in hospital, they were having some problems with x-ray machine with server based on windows XP and thin clients as viewing stations. Eventually it was replaced with debian based workstations and haven't look back ever since. After this he told me about interesting case with it, there was patient complaining about middle foot pains, on pr…

I agree that we should be using using open / standard format for data and images, but no general rule can be deducted from the fact that one particular FOSS software was better than a particular proprietary software, and in this particular case it looks like which OS they were running on had nothing to do with the better diagnostic.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#50

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?

Many lower-middle class people have smartphones but not a computer because a smartphone is often much cheaper and also satisfies most of their needs for calling, texting, etc.
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