GNU Health

My name is Dr. Suneel Sharman M.D. (co founder of http://www.askthedoctor.com) and I find this tool to be very useful and helpful for myself as a physician

Hi, I'd like to add my 2 cents, as I see that this is a project of the month, and open emr's have the potential to help so many people. As you have certainly noticed, there are countless emr's today, and all of them do a reasonable job of CONTAINING all of the important information, however they are often horribly non-intuitive (aka an ORGANIZATION problem). If I may make a simple suggestion; the paper chart has persisted for so long because it does a few things really well, pleeease consider making the gui of your emr look more like a paper chart. Rather than itemized sections with tabs all over the place, have ALL the info for a particular date viewable on one page. Have one set of tabs running vertically down the side which are divided by categories (i.e. Labs, progress notes, consults, radiology, etc.). Then have one set of tabs running across the top which has sections cross-referenced over time (yes, something emr's can do that paper charts cannot). This allows doctors to track TRENDS. For example, how has a person's Creatinine trended over the duration of their hospital stay or the chronic course of their kidney failure. Or their chest xray looks bad, but how has it changed over time? Things like that. So to sum up my ramblings, there's a lot of "been there, done that" with most emr's - that's why there are so many of them. They're all doing a great job of having all the info, but none of them present it in a way that is intuitive or helpful to the physician. I think the "tabs across the top, tabs down the side, make it look like like a paper chart" approach could raise quite a few eyebrows if it's done right. And FYI, I'm a new emergency room doctor (graduated a few months ago) who's tech-savvy, but has no formal IT training. I came to SourceForge because of XBMC, and if anyone is interested in my thoughts on how emr's can be improved, I'm happy to give them. Thank you.

great product