The building blocks of TORCH have evolved a great deal over the past couple of years. It is time to take a long hard look at what must be done better and different to produce a comprehensive electronic health record and practice management application.

There has been discussion on the TORCH list regarding upgrading the medication management and other aspects of TORCH.

The 1.x series of TORCH releases are very flexible but are not well documented and difficult to get up and running. Several events have occured recently that clears the way for TORCH design and implementation to be revisited.

It is important to get as much input as possible into the design phase from the future users. With that in mind; Open Paradigms, LLC has set up a living document making it easier to capture contributions than is possible from email archives.

Everyone involved in patient care should contribute to these discussions in order to produce the excellent application we all know this process can produce.