Working towards an “Open Source” and, in future, also an increasingly "Wiki" approach to the future of Shared Hospital/Community Perinatal Care IT Systems:

A Blueprint for similar shared-care specialities??

Multiple Discussion Links: www.eepd.org.uk

 

Basic Principles:

 

Despite a widespread belief, even among highly trained professionals, that computers are magic; both on financial and on technical grounds, it is, in practice, impossible to adequately integrate large flow-patterned databases. Once they have been fully installed, adequate interoperability has proved to impractical.

 

Numerous examples confirm that the toxic combination of gullible managerial purchasers and plausible IT sales con-men results time and time again, in projects disastrously over-running in time and cost, with an eventual failure to provide a viable inter-operative system at all.

 

For this simple reason, analysable and linkable Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) will only attain their true potential for improving the quality of patient care and reducing the risk of human error, without excessive data re-entry overload, when, in each speciality and sub-speciality - following intense, open, web-based discussions - their detailed, logically and chronologically-arranged, flow-patterned questions and the full range of all allowable answer-options - [always including, whenever needed, “Unknown (Free Text)” and “Other (Free Text)”] - are, by stages, taking account of as many interested parties as possible, individual question by individual question, internationally standardised. (Like our classification of organisms, diseases and operations, but 10,000 times more complex).

 

Such specifications will only become universally standardised if they are (a) created by hundreds of hours of work by health care professionals, since only they have the professional knowledge required for this task, and (b) are open-source and cost free to all potential users. 

 

Confidential competition has no place in the creation of the software required for fully functioning electronic patient records.  The most vital part of the EEPD is therefore:

 

(Updated 10 September 2010)

 

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