Category Archives: why start from scratch

Multi-platform patient logging software?

I am a software developer for the University of South Florida’s College of Medicine (http://hsc.usf.edu). I have been assigned the task of evaluating a new system that will replace one of our old systems. The old system is a tool used by students inorder to ‘log’ the patients they see during there clerkships (time spent under the wing of a doctor at local hospitals, they help with dx’s and simple procedures, if you have ever dealt with the education side of medicine this is standard procedure for later year students). Anyone know of existing solutions, or anyone else in a similar situation looking to partner?

The format of these ‘logs’ is quite simple:

1 entry / patient visit with the following fields:

Patient Info: name, dob, gender, etc

Site: Name of hospital patient was seen at

Attending Physician: Name of patients doc

3 Diagnoses
-For simplicity these have been spit up into smaller subgroups i.e. the student would load the ‘ob/gyn’ data entry
page inorder to enter data regarding an ob/gyn case

3 Procedures
-For each procedure there is a sub field describing the students involvment i.e. assisted, preformed, watched etc

Now here is the tricky part… this new peice of software will have to run in 3 enviroments: Desktop, Web, and PDA (probably an ipaq).Google hasnt been of much help, one project looked hopefull http://sf.net/projects/opensde and i also found another commercial app for palm pdas. I am not even sure where to begin… or what development enviroment i should choose… i am leaning towards Java… 1 codebase that can run as an applet standalone or on a portable device… but there are other options as well. Did i mention that it also has to generate reports, and be able to upload each students logs to some form of ‘mother server’… Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

-Jon