[Gnumed-devel] question about gnumed and database

[Omar Mouline]

Hi all,

This message is addressed to all gnuMed members but especially to the 
administrator.

I'm a second year medical student at the University of Sydney, 
Australia. I came across your project while reading a classmate's 
article in the USyd Medical Journal. My clinical school is the Royal 
Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH), the main teaching hospital of Sydney Uni. 
I'm presently doing an option at the Vascular Lab, which does all the 
perioperative assessments for patients with vascular disease (deep 
venous thrombosis, cerebrovascular stroke, etc).
To get to the point:
Although the main wards have a state of the art network,  some sections 
such as the Vascular Lab are grossly underfunded and still running win98 
and some antiquated vascular database and are very unstable. Needless to 
say, it's been a nightmare to try and network the machines in the lab 
with the rest of the hospital and recently one month's worth of patient 
data was permanently lost. I'm also told that  they haven't had a proper 
IT administrator for 2 years now!
I should add that RPAH is non-profit public hospital, and home to some 
of the best professors of medicine and surgery in Australia and the 
world. It is a shame that they have to pay some ridiculous amount to get 
their Windows upgrade.
So my question to you guys is:
First, can gnuMed or some other open source database be adapted for use 
in the vascular lab? The present database is  fairly simple  with 
patient demographics, risk factors, indications, referring physician,  
procedure, post-op write-up, and other drop-list parameters. It is old 
and does not provide any statistical info (i.e. how many patients under 
65 had a stroke this month and how many of those were stented). Second, 
do you think it's feasible to run Fedora or some other form of Linux on 
the Vasc Lab computer and network them seamlessly with the hospital's 
Windows server (I'll have to double check that but the ward terminals 
are running win2000).
I should also mention that my first degree was in EE (control) from UC 
Santa Barbara, hence my interest in all things technical (I get to play 
with the doppler machines in the vasc lab). Programming is not my forte 
but I know some basic C. From browsing through your website, it seems 
Python is the way to go these days. Is that true for database as well?
BTW, do any of you live in Sydney?
That's it for now.
Thank you for your time.
Cheers.

Omar


--
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Omar Mouline GMP2
Faculty of Medicine
University of Sydney

Tel: +61 2 9517 1586
Cell: +61 431 348 136
address@hidden