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Open source software for developing world hospitals

hospitalrun.io

61–70 of 119 posts

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#61

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…

Stuff like this shows the gulf between research and clinical practice. I'm doing a PhD in medical imaging, and we have carte blanche to run whatever we want. We generate a lot of amazing visualisations.

But almost all hospitals are stuck running out-of-date software that wasn't even good when it was released.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#63
post #59
post #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 do…

I think it's too easy to blame proprietarism as such. It's a lack of universal sophistication in computer technology that makes designing systems living up to real medical concerns great efforts. When the "manufacturing techniques" of computer software is modernized, and enables more widespread implementation of these types of systems, proprietary formats simple won't be able to compete.

That still means that proprietarism is a huge problem. I been through a melanoma I can attest to the absurdity.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#64
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ahh, you misunderstood me. It was open source many years ago and that body of code doesn't seem to exist anywhere now.

Things have long moved on from that period, but a few of us are just curious to see if the code is still around from that time or if our product is one mavhc was talking about (unlikely).

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in a a post-plaintext world. There is zero reason why any system should not have crypto around sensitive data.

That's not what compliance is about in the medical field.

It's been a while since I was involved in that domain, but when CCHIT was the only game in town in the USA, certification was a joke. I know there is a bit more competition now, but I doubt it's improved much.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#66
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they likely to have smart-phones to use?

I just spent a week in La Gonave, Haiti. Everybody had smart phones...which was particularly impressive because electricity is hard to come by.

That's precisely why - You don't need 5 hours of electricity to get 5 hours of use on your smartphone, but you do need constant juice for a desktop PC.

A laptop would also give you more time, but not as much as a smartphone.

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#67

While I don't agree with many of the specifics of the HL7 spec[1], I guess the community behind this project should decide if this system will conform or not. [1] http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/

IMHO, the HL7 specification isn't particularly strong. Different vendors support different message types, some vendors fill in this field, some another. Most of the work I did with HL7 was making sure System A could read the messages we were passing it from System B by "translating" the HL7 messages.

That said, there are open HL7 message "interface engines" and integrating with something like Mirth[0] shouldn't be too difficult.

[0] https://www.mirth.com/Products-and-Services/Mirth-Connect

Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals

#69
post #47

Looks great. Why such emphasis on "Ember"? Does the target audience really care what front-end framework is used?

I applaud the efforts taken here, more than I've ever done, and it looks good. But wasn't there big talk of Ember's (JavaScript's) poor(er) performance on Android devices recently? It seems like this tech would be prime for Android users. I don't know if the performance is bad from a usability standpoint or just a pure numbers via specs point of view.
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