| Hubris | Choosing a First or Replacement EMR System |
| Home |
There are some obvious bases for choice, and one which is less obvious but is important to your PCG. Who should pay for it. |
Scripting Language now EssentialWhile it may be quite reasonable to hang on to a system that has not yet added a scripting language 1 it would be a dubious decision to buy one.The point of requiring a scripting language is that however well a particular system suits a practice, in order to fit into the Primary Care Group you will need to customise it a little. Relying on 20 practices persuading their suppliers to write such customisation into the main application would be ridiculous, as would relying upon central direction to provide any PCG with what it needed via RFA, in time to meet the requirements another arm of Government laid upon it. No. There is an inevitable need for a scripting languuage to allow for small, localised, coordinated tweaks to the behaviour of the system. The DisplayDon't buy 14 inch screens. Buy 15 inch or 17 inch. Think about a 19 inch one somewhere. Many users still panic if one full screen application supplants another. On a 17" CRT there is plenty of room for overlapped windows. Footnotes[1] Meditel SOPHIEs, EMIS Protocols, Torex ISIS' are all examples of a scripting language being used to manipulate the way in which the base program is used. MS DOS has batch files, and Windows has VB Script and JScript, which could be used to drive a program written with that in mind, such as Word for Windows, or a emdical record program. |