medical software - should i write my own or use existing?

Question

i know nothing about medical records but im sure there's great opportunity in it now.

im planning to either find software that manages records or build my own.

if i do build my own, can someone recommend a platform to use? i prefer vb.net. is there anything better for this?

if you do not recommend me to build my own medical records keeping software, please recommend something that is already existent. is that opensource openEMR any good?

i am planning to start some kind of system as a DEMO for a small doctor's office.

Answer 1

There are existing standards (for example, HL7), which vary somewhat from continent to continent (e.g. North America not necessarily using the same standards as Europe), and vendors' implementations of those standards.

Answer 2

There may be better opportunities in supporting an existing open source medical services app than in creating a new one.

In Canada, OSCAR is a well-regarded open source medical admin application. You can find a list of other such programs, mainly American, at Sourceforge.

Answer 3

Also see the Practice Fusion tool.

I read about them a bit ago here: http://healthcare.zdnet.com/?p=2522

Answer 4

If you want a sledgehammer, the the US Veterans Administrations software is open source, and I thought well regarded (or so I read years ago).

You might want to tell us what scale you are looking for, a one doc office, or a hospital chain?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

Answer 5

I work in the medical industry as an EDI developer. If you "know nothing about it" as you say, I would recommend strongly against trying to create your own. Even beginning to understand all the nuances surrounding the medical field, all the related laws at local, state and federal levels, the variations between how the exact same "standards" are applied across the various segments of the industry and so forth, can take years or longer.

For instance, there are defined standards, but every state government has their own set of "variations" and exceptions and custom rules, and even across segments in the same state things are not handled the same way (i.e. Medicaid, Medicare, HMOs, TPAs, MCOs and so forth can all have different, and often contradictory, regulations that they have to follow within the same state.

Add to that the fact that regulations change on an ongoing basis and, if the federal government gets its way, things are going to change drastically across the board in coming years.

For a developer, the medical field can be one of the most complex

If you want to pursue this, I would recommend taking on a couple of partners, specifically people with extensive skills and backgrounds as business systems analysts in the medical field to guide you and making extensive use of existing tools as a base and, at least at first, focusing on a very specific segment to start with to build up your experience and background.

As for tools, any of the .NET tools are excellent, though I would recommend C# over VB if you can. There's a broader support for C# in third party tools and apps. In addition to some of the tools others have mentioned, I would also add that you will need mapping software, such as Altova's MapForce. This will aid substantially in your ability to transfer records between entities and between formats and mapforce includes the ability to export the map you design as a C# based .dll you can add to your own home grown apps.

Answer 6

There are about 2000 medical record vendors. I do not know a lot about costs, markups price points in the market but I will say that the software is usually phenomenally expensive. It seems to be based on "what the market can bear". Almost every package I have used looks completely amateur compared to software in almost any other category I have used. It maybe that the market is quite small when it is divided by 2000 vendors.

Most database software and general business software would do the job quite well but there are peculiarities to medicine such as HIPAA.

One of the most intelligent pieces of medical software that I have seen (at least for documenting evaluation and management encoutners) is Praxis. You have to be a doctor who is in practice to realize how genius it is. Disclaimer: I have not used it but wish I could.

Penultimately, for medical software to work the patient has to have a portal into it so that they can update, or bring attention to, mistakes.

Finally, all medical software is fantastic when demonstrated. One only knows its flaws when one uses it on every patient for about 6 weeks.