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Prit Buttar writes.... >I am involved in a project to see how difficult it is to devise a GP >computer system using existing commercial software; it is proposed to >produce a system using either Access or FoxPro, running under Win95. ...... ...... >I have my own list of must-haves and desirables; please send me >yours! I believe the major difficulties lie not in the choice of what "commercial software" to use but in designing (and then building) a usable system itself. There are several crucial questions to ask, but unfortunately few get asked; they need to be answerd if there is to be any significant advance on the first generation of systems being used at present. There are at least four levels at which such questions may be asked. This is not a complete list! The requirements/design stage:- - What tasks (clinical and others) should the system support? - What aspect of these tasks will it help me with? (what will it DO?) - HOW will the system help me do what I want? - What are the implications for using and integrating the system in my day-to-day life in the surgery, and for other staff? Aspects of infrastructure:- - What are the information requirements of these tasks? (i.e. what information will the system need to hold, and what will I have to enter to get it to do things?) - What sort of information infrastructure is needed to support these? (What representation of clinical information is needed?; are existing ones good enough? do they support the tasks I want to carry out?) Implementation of the system - Is it possible to implement the system easily and RELIABLY? Securely? - If so, what software platform should be used to ensure all our requirements are met? (some common commercial software on PCs can't cope with the infrastructure needs) - How do we make the information entered portable (a) across systems and hardware platforms (b) over time, especailly as medical ideas and software capabiilities change (c) between practitioners (so I don't misinterpret what YOU have said)? - How do we build the necessary communication capabilities into the system to cope with (a) clinical communication - individual patients (b) administrative data (c) epidemiological data (NB some people want to interrogate your database remotely) The interface There are too many questions to list - but the interface has to be comprehensive, intuitive, easy tu use but hard to foul up, etc. Unfortunately an area that loses out every time because people would rather think about whether a 486 or a Pentium is needed..... Lastly, the hardware. OK, the target has to be something that is either already in place or likely to be so in the near future. But remember that the computers NASA used to get people to the moon and back made an IBM PC with an 8088 chip an 16kB of memory look like a Cray. My experience tells me to get the design right first, then worry about the implementation; at worst, not all of it will be implmentable today but the design won't be out of date tomorrow. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Andrzej Glowinski [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%