[log in to unmask],Net writes:
>Subject: vamp
>Date: Sat, 4 Jul 98 15:18 BST-1

>well i've finally terminated my contract with vamp.
That must be a great relief.

>they are threatening to send round an engineer to remove my manuals and
>wipe my discs - can they do this

>is it legal??

The legality or otherwise of them securing entry to your premises,
performing a deliberately destructive act upon a medical record system
now maintained by a company of significant size - EMIS - is probably
not the significant point.

It would be an act of mind-numbing stupidity for any company to try
such a thing.
Have they never heard of backups?  They could hardly expect to succeed
in preventing anyone retaining a copy of the software Reuters acquired
for reasons still not satisfactorily explained to users or
shareholders, so why do anything quite so thick?

The contract Vamp offer, and I understand the conditions the Vamp User
Group agreed with the company incude the provision that any user may
retain one copy of the software - the exectutables - in order to read
their archived data in the future.
Given the executable contains a copy protection and licence expiry
system, there is no particular benefit to retaining it other than for
archive reading.

I think everyone agrees that it is desirable to retain the original
data, for a few years, in order to allow you to read notes as they were
made, and of course so as to view the audit trail for times before the
EMIS conversion.

If you do eventually lose the executables altogether don't worry, just
ask me for the Windows SM viewer.  You do have to reindex some tables
so it is not entirely inter-operable at the same time with SM.

We should look for solutions which involve a common format, or common
intermediate formats, for medical record data, and which allow several
suppliers to develop inter-operable EMR-Processors.
Given the variation among GPs which has lead to the several interfaces
on offer at present, and the inevitable harmonisation across members of
a single PCG/Co-op/partnership/Firm on underlying or overarching IT
solutions, the only way I see of providing each GP with a desktop
interface best suited to their style of working is to develop in such a
way.  The alternative of a customisable interface such as a big MS
Office development still seems likely to be a bit slow.



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