[Gnumed-devel] Re-kindling the debate on the database structure

[richard terry]

Now that Ian and I have a reasonable gui-interface up and running we really 
need to do something with it.

Ian made the joke/comment last night (not an exact quote) the gist of which 
was if I caught it correctly

 "great, we've now got a thousand line program which does nothing", to which I 
might add, quite a complex program at that.

The only way we are going to move this thing forward now is to pool our 
resources and get a mechanism going to actually get a database struture 
defined to allow us to enter, save and retrieve data.

If we spend the next two years trying to get it exact, we will never get 
there. I've noted numbers of people who have expressed interest in gnuMed 
seem to have 'gone quiet' or perhaps disappeared entirely from the list.

Perhaps I'm missing some of the debate which as gone on/is going on privately.
Whatever the case I propose we try and get it going again and choose a 
segment, and I propose immunization because it doesn't have to have 
proprietry data in it and is probably relatively consistant across the world. 

I would add that in Australia that it an opportune time to push forward. We 
have had expressions of interest from people such as the NPS (national 
precribing service) and Ken Harvey from the Guidelines mob. Many thousands of 
GP's are currently using  software packages that, if you listen to the 
groundswell of opinion, are serving them in a less than satisfactory manner. 
We need something functional to offer them an alternative which will at a 
minimum replace the currently functionality.

Lets get this started.