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GNU Health

gnuhealth.org

111–120 of 138 posts

Re: GNU Health

#111
post #2

Heath centers pay unreal amounts of money for these kinds of commercial products, but in my experience the health centers themselves have very few technical resources. So the real "value" being delivered by the commercial software providers is often the setup, support, and hand-holding provided to customers who pay the crazy amounts. I imagine there will be a niche but high-paid market integrating these GNUHealth pro…

I could certainly imagine NHS England looking at this and creating something that hospitals and GPs could deploy

I can't. There are engineers advocating for open source in the NHS but management is mostly non technical and will go for a big corporate product every time.

Re: GNU Health

#112
post #97
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's broken window fallacy.

"Broken windows" is not a fallacy. The common belief that it's a fallacy is a fallacy. "Broken windows" indeed can stimulate the economy and improve the lives of people. But not _always_.

How can it stimulate the economy? That's just lack of consideration of cost of opportunity. Hospitals paying for more of similar software is hospitals not paying for something else that could actually improve care.

Re: GNU Health

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could certainly imagine NHS England looking at this and creating something that hospitals and GPs could deploy

Sadly, very sadly, I cannot imagine it. I have seen the inside of NHS IT.

Yeh, I could imagine GDS (government digital services) having the capability, but not NHS digital whose remit this would likely fall under. They just don't have the resources or experience.

Re: GNU Health

#114
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could certainly imagine NHS England looking at this and creating something that hospitals and GPs could deploy

I'd love it if my government created a civil reserve for technology workers. Let me volunteer every weekend to help fix infrastructure so I don't have to give up my existing job.

This is on one hand quite the fantastic idea, but I imagine it falls down to bureaucracy, for example for health services related stuff everyone would need pretty thorough training in the legal aspects, and insurance might be difficult, and preventing malicious actors from contributing so probably security clearance (for example if the military use it for their healthcare) or at least a thorough background check. I think open sourcing everything is far far easier than a volunteer based setup.

Re: GNU Health

#115
post #97
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's broken window fallacy.

"Broken windows" is not a fallacy. The common belief that it's a fallacy is a fallacy. "Broken windows" indeed can stimulate the economy and improve the lives of people. But not _always_.

How does exactly "breaking windows" improve the lives of people?

Re: GNU Health

#116
post #115
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Broken windows" is not a fallacy. The common belief that it's a fallacy is a fallacy. "Broken windows" indeed can stimulate the economy and improve the lives of people. But not _always_.

How does exactly "breaking windows" improve the lives of people?

By creating work that needs to be done, and thus forcing people to start spending.

Re: GNU Health

#117
post #112
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Broken windows" is not a fallacy. The common belief that it's a fallacy is a fallacy. "Broken windows" indeed can stimulate the economy and improve the lives of people. But not _always_.

How can it stimulate the economy? That's just lack of consideration of cost of opportunity. Hospitals paying for more of similar software is hospitals not paying for something else that could actually improve care.

"Broken windows" can help to jumpstart a stalled economy, that exists in a state of depressed spending. In modern economies, this state is immediately apparent when the interest rate goes down to near zero.

E.g. the US in 2008. Or Europe and the US in 1930.

Re: GNU Health

#118
To preface: I would be happy to see open source adoption in healthcare.

This is presented as an open source software project but it should also make a pitch to managers and doctors - the decision-makers. I put "GNU Health" into YouTube and the first few pages of results were very old and mostly amateur screencasts showing installation while one was an animated presentation with an awful robo voice. I should add none were official videos from the project team.

Then on the official site it says there's a laboratory information management component, but that is not apparent on the documentation page. This is not reassuring if I'm tasked with evaluating for potential adoption.

Next I tried looking up how the Jamaican Health Ministry is using it. The page seems to be over 10 years old: https://www.moh.gov.jm/technical-services-division/health-in... but again this is not under the control of the project team. The main team should help successful users write up their projects (the one page version) and then link to those write ups.

Re: GNU Health

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could certainly imagine NHS England looking at this and creating something that hospitals and GPs could deploy

Sadly, very sadly, I cannot imagine it. I have seen the inside of NHS IT.

I've seen inside NHS IT too (currently work in the NHS). It's patchy, but there are some talented people. Given the push for digital - and cost-saving at the moment, I can well imagine a GDS-style core group being started that would 'productise' this for Trusts - and even offer support, the way the Accenture crew does reasonably well for Microsoft products etc

Re: GNU Health

#120
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would happen if EU harmonized the legislation so that the EU states could go together and develop an OSS journaling system. The amount of money saved would be astronomical.

Spending money is what drives the economy. No diverse expensive healthcare software means thousands of employees don't get paid and don't spend earned money within the economy.

Money is always spent on something, economy is about how to spend it efficiently
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