Good evening,
I work as a general Paediatrician in a single private practice. I very much agree with the general requirement description that Sebastian has outlined, but I would have some points and comments to add on to that:
1) As far as the issuing of invoices is concerned, this is an aspect not so much covered by current versions of medical practice management software circulating in the Greek market. The actual invoices are all too simply issued by hand-writing either by the doctor himself or by his secretary. I am therefore not convinced that sophisticated capabilities of this kind would be of great help for the average Greek doctor (perhaps in the future...)
2) appointment handling is surely an important issue and, given that I am working on the basis of specific vaccination schedules for kids, I have to plan my following appointments on specific dates, depending on what kind of vaccine I am administrating today. So it could be a preset value like 1 or 2 or 6 months later.
3) The electronic medical record keeping is -in my case- the most vital part of the whole idea of medical practice software. It has to be capable of a- giving me a "free" space where to freely comment and document my diagnosis. Of course, any diagnosis could also be picked up from some sort of ready-made drop-down list of internationally recognised disease entities (like ICD, DSM-IV, etc) but, then again, one any single contact with the patient, one can just have a simple semeiotic observation to make and not a proper diagnosis... Perhaps, the programme could give us the flexibility to make-up one's own drop-list of diagnoses....
4) a medication AND vaccination database is also an important integral part of the project
5) the Lab result part has some peculiarities for a paediatric practice, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a single cut-off point to differentiate between pathological and normal in this field..... There are surely the so called "normal ranges of values" which are though different according to the different ages of a child. So, it becomes a bit fussy, as one would have to introduce not just the various Lab parameters desired in every day practice but also multiple normal ranges for each different paediatric age.....
6) Furthermore, another essential part of a similar paediatric suite should comprise of all available growth centile charts (for baby boys and girls, for all ages up to 18, for the premature babies and BMI charts) in order to follow up the child correctly in his/her various stages.
7) A possibility to use such a software in order to produce several different certificates, letters and medical reports on any given patient, would also be a neccessary component. (I think it must be what Sebastian indicated as an "Office suite connected to an EMR software")
8) Another useful possibility for a Paediatrician would be the ability to import pictures (perhaps even taken with one's mobile phone camera or just a simple digital camera). (I can easily recall instances where I wish I could "immortalize" a skin rash picture and review it later for some more thought...)
9) The possibility to export any patient data or medical reports and send them over to the Web as an e-mail or just fax them through to anywhere in the world, would also be a welcome bonus
10) Another important aspect must also be the security of all these sensitive personal data issue: how to control access to them (keywords? biometric data like fingerprint readers?) and also how to safely store them (local internal hard-drive or external mass-memory hard-drive)? Perhaps contemporaneously to store them remotely to some "safe" server?? and last but not least, there should be a single-move procedure to delete massively all patient data at once (of course to be accessed through a keyword or through some multiple key-stroke combination)
These are just some thoughts, thrown in to the discussion.
Thanks to everyone.


2010/1/29 Sebastian Hilbert <sebastian.hilbert@gmx.net>
Am Freitag 29 Januar 2010 07:00:26 schrieb susmit shannigrahi:
> Hi,
>
> As we agreed about finding out the requirements of practitioners, it
> would be nice to get them listed.
> It may seem like a foolish question, but bear with me. :)
>
> 1. In general practice what are the tasks that need uses of software?

Germany:
software is used for:
- accounting and invoices - very sophisticated and heavily regulated by law
- appointments handling
- electronic medical record - store information on patient's health
- lab results handling - sometimes a seperate software package is used
- medication databases for prescription wrtiting
- Office suite connected to EMR software for all kinds of patient related
letters
- optional : patient data exchange software
- optional: web browser to look up medical information
- optional: email client
- optional: fax software

Sebastian
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