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GNU Health

gnuhealth.org

91–100 of 138 posts

Re: GNU Health

#91

No offence but GNU is not an organisation I would associate with health, usability and practical software. Noble effort no doubt. Misguided perhaps.

No offence but IshKebab is not a person I would associate with someone who knows anything about health, useable and practical software. No matter how noble their intentions are about criticizing software they’ve never used nor never attempt to use because of unfounded stigmas. Misguided indeed.

Automake, bash, emacs, gnucash, gnuhealth, coreutils, gnupg, gimp, grep, make, etc. are all great pieces of GNU software. Don’t take my word for it, here is a list of all the too-many-to-name gnu software used out in the world extensively:

https://www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html

Re: GNU Health

#92
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vista is ancient, and it's written in MUMPS, an evil twin of COBOL.

No, MUMPS (or M) is a remote descendant of JOSS, an interactive language of the 1950s. JOSS has all sorts of variants (DEC's FOCAL language of the 1960s was a dialect), but I think MUMPS is the only living one. MUMPS code is mostly unreadable, as the commands can be, and often are, abbreviated to the first letter. As a result, it looks a lot like line noise. Regardless of its many warts, Cobol cannot be accused of be…

> Regardless of its many warts, Cobol cannot be accused of being unreadable. Verbose, yes.

Hence the "evil twin" comment :)

Re: GNU Health

#93
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.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart's law.

Re: GNU Health

#94
This is really cool to see. I've been on the lookout for software like this ever since reading "Why Doctor's Hate Their Computers" in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha....

HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24336039

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381969

I wonder how feasible it would be to replace the current software in practice?

Re: GNU Health

#95
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's broken window fallacy.

I think you're right. At the end of the day it just makes healthcare more costly without real benefit.

Re: GNU Health

#97
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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_.

Re: GNU Health

#98
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it was a volunteer effort without ulterior motives, it would be beneficial to society, but ultimately who is on call? Who pushes for hard, but beneficial changes that might not have immediate obvious value? Who accepts risk or responsibility. Ultimately that’s the point of the market. Incentivize people to take risks for rewards. Allow others to improve on proven models for lower costs. Unfortunately, government d…

It's pretty common for traditional organised volunteer services to have "on call" aspects.

Think of like volunteer firefighters, The Samaritans, St John Ambulance, the UK lifeguards and lifeboats (RNLI). Such organisations do usually have full time paid staff too, but the bulk of the front line work is part time volunteer.

Re: GNU Health

#99
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MyGNU Health looks to be along the lines of Apple Health and is intended to be used by consumers to monitor vitals and track statistics.

It makes sense to own your own medical data rather than handing it over to big tech/FAANG.

Also to manage it on a device that is not owned by big tech/FAANG

I’d never put my health data on an iPhone or Googlized phone.

Re: GNU Health

#100
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem open-source, and social media, and everything digital, has never overcome is accountability . Who do I sue, and who has insurance, if something goes wrong? Combine that with most small businesses having more money than time (just pay Gmail, don’t spend the required amount of time to self host), and open-source is stuck at being hobbyists if there is no corporate sponsorship.

The person implementing the system for the hospital is accountable. I don’t see why this is difficult because it would be the same if that person built their own product from scratch. There’s no vendor here that they can sue if they were paying for a product and deploying that, but that’s a different situation and the hospital, frankly, won’t care about that. Who their supplier subsequently sues isn’t their problem.

Also, quite frankly, whatever fancy contract you have and whatever legal system is backing it up, if the system you're using fails, it's your problem. You can't actually shuffle around all consequences freely.

I see this so often where people pay huge amounts of money (either buying a more expensive system or buying vs building) because 'we need the support!' and then still wind up with a bad system because the quality of the product modulated by the support offered still creates problems, and being able to blame someone else doesn't actually make the problems go away.

And even in cases where the problem is 'we might get sued', the fact that you have someone else to sue is to a large extent multiplying problems because you now have two lawsuits.

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