Taran's Adventures With Drupal In Guyana; Part 4: The Hospital Project Continues

Having looked at Dr. Persaud's Microsoft Access database, which presently has over 3,000 records, I will try to convert it tomorrow to a more Open MySQL - and I expect I'll write about that as soon as I'm done with it. There are a few tools that promise conversion, and I'll try them out. Of course, on Microsoft Windows, I can probably use ODBC, but I expect that these conversion tools do exactly the same thing.

For the medical records themselves, I can hard code them using PHP, writing my own module and so on - but that presents problems in the future with support that I am still considering. For now, I will experiment with the Flexinode module for Drupal and see how far I can take it. Some experiments so far show that I may need to change the representation so that it isn't as 'stacked'. That's a usability issue, and I'm not sure Flexinode is intelligent enough (yet?) to handle that.

There are a few things I am considering. It's relatively easy to get the medical records and laboratory results done - not to mention attachments of images, and uploads of images. The difficult part is getting them all to interact. One mechanism for doing this is the comment sort of entry using Drupal - and another is the trackback. But in the end, this all has to be indexable and be able to track from the patient to these results - it should also be able to track results to patient records, and allow the user to handle the data in a manner that is not overwhelming. Fortunately, this will be an intranet application (and I expect batch coordination will be used for multiple hospitals if it takes off), which means that the upload and download speeds for the end users will be dictated by their network connection instead of their internet connection. Still, overwhelming users is a bit of an issue.

Then, too, I am considering the book module as well - a book being a great way for a patient to have a medical record. Every visit, a child page is added to the book (for those of you familiar with Drupal), and that child page will have comments - such as the laboratory, X-ray and miscellaneous other information that is held there. The front page of the book will have all of the static information of the patient, such as chronic illnesses. Used in conjunction with Mozilla, a Doctor could tab between that and the present visit - as well as all the past visits he or she wanted to refer to.

Advanced queries with MySQL will have to be done for specific information that the hospital will need... but that's further down the pipes.

A lot of this will have to be formalized for non-technical people. I've been informed that I have to have a presentation ready for this Friday for the Board of the St. Joseph Mercy Hospital here in Georgetown, Guyana - which means that the pretty pictures I drew will come in handy (OpenOffice.org, of course). Hardware, Software... while the server will be running Linux (More on that and Kumar the hardware gent in another entry), the systems being used may not be - and since all the software on the campus is actually licensed, it's sensible that the hospital get it's money's worth. The web application means that any OS should work. So... hardware requirements are expected to be small. The real work will be the software.

We're supposed to have the network cable tomorrow - as well as the switches - so that's another aspect to deal with. I'm told that I'll have some help with that. In fact, Dr. Persaud - the Medical Director for the hospital - will be helping, crimping cables and whatever else. Wireless was considered, but... it's only wire, and outfitting all the machines with wireless cards can be an expensive proposition. Then maintaining a secured wireless network isn't an issue as yet either.

Lots of work. With so many things getting juggled, I actually forgot to sleep last night. I better get some rest tonight.