Tom Hawkins wrote:
At the core, the fundamental problem is not that complicated. It's just storing and retrieving a person's various health events: checkups, prescriptions, procedures, test results, etc. The main technical challenges are database distribution and patient security. Both are fun problems, and our friends at Galios continue to show how effective Haskell is at building secure systems.
Any thoughts? Ideas?
Actually, it's a lot more complicated than that, albeit not for "technical" reasons. There's a great deal of legislation about what can and cannot be done with medical records: who can have access to them, under what circumstances, how they can be transmitted, stored, etc. This is more than just boilerplate code--- clinics can be audited to prove proper handling and can loose their licenses or worse for improper handling of records. Additionally, the requisite formats do require a lot of boilerplate code since the protocols were defined back in the paper age and medical legislation moves at the speed of mountains. I worked briefly on an open-source database project for managing a medical clinic's records (so, not even for dealing with the public in any way). The technical feat isn't that difficult, as you say, but the human engineering involved can be quite complex--- and the human programming will have major effects on the design, in order to forbid invalid or unacceptable behavior. It's not a project to undertake lightly or without corporate funding. Medical record management is a market that has very low penetration from the F/OSS movement, which in turn places a burden on smaller clinics, so I'm all for anyone who's willing to invest in an open solution :) -- Live well, ~wren