OK, maybe it won't save the world. My name is Mark Morgan and I'm working on a project which might be of interest to some of you. I'm a family doctor in Minnesota and I'm associated with a really, really big clinic in Minnesota as well as the US Indian Health Service. Neither institution is associated with the project I describe below.
http://bitbucket.org/mmorgan71/soapnote The project involves clinical (medical) documentation and using templates (not in the Django sense) for some of the more routine visits. I believe that an application that inserts blurbs into free text fields would augment medical care and could work with nearly any Electronic Medical Record (EMR). I'm not a programmer. I thought I was smart because I had done a lot with MS Access before medical school. Working on this has been a lesson in humility. So much clinical software is proprietary. Over the last year and a half learning about Django, I've learned that the narrow focus of a proprietary project ignores the abundance of benefits of an open source effort. A year ago, I approached the Indian Health Service about my project and they encouraged me to pursue open-source. I'm currently in residency and have kids, so I haven't had a whole lot of time to work on this, except in the middle of the night when I'm not on call. But I still believe in this project. I was afraid to put it out there until I had something like a "proof of concept". Over the last few weeks, I've basically cloned Ayman Hourieh's application in his awesome book: "Django 1.0 Web Site Development". Instead of sharing bookmarks, though, this is sharing pieces of text which would be rough clinical note text. I plugged in django-tagging and a csv importer. His project includes voting, commenting, and social networking features and those are all important to me. For my project, I'm hoping to refine the interface, add a bookmarking feature, and put together something of a note builder. What I envision for the note builder is: a mechanism for saving a few blurbs of text to build the different "SOAP" sections of a medical note (the S is subjective (patient's complaint), the O is objective (doctor's examination), the A is assessment (diagnosis) and the P is plan (treatment). So the user clicks on an S, O, A, and P (or any combination) and builds their note. Then that can be dumped into a temporary text file on their computer or they can just copy it to the clipboard. I have some other thoughts on what would happen to that text file, but this is already becoming a long post. The basic functionality of just getting your note put together and copying and pasting it into the EMR would be a great improvement. And OH HOW would I love for this to be on App Engine (and I do keep trying) but I can't figure out how to do this with Django Nonrel (or helper or patch). I believe that this would make medical care better. The content would be open-source as well. Medical providers collaborating to improve the questions we ask, the exams we do, and treatments we provide. At the point of care. There's also a place for this in medical training. A student is given the assignment of creating a clinical note for a common visit: upper respiratory infection. They submit their note to their precepting physician who gives feedback via this website. And the information persists for all to benefit. I've been looking periodically over the last year and a half and there isn't a project like this (open source or otherwise). There are lots and lots of EMRs out there, but the EMRs are proprietary and that works against collaboration. One note, you may see "evidence" is one of my models. This is important. It is the piece that providers use to decide if treatments actually work. Linking these "SOAP notes" to evidence will help select out the clinical notes that are "best practices". To a certain extent, every doctor is reinventing the wheel with every single patient visit. It's really amazing to me how similar programming is to providing medical care. And here we could apply DRY to both! So, I've been living with this "ideal app" in my head for a long time now, and even though the code is going to make you throw up and a lot of the urls are messed up, I thought maybe at least one person might be interested in helping with this. Let me know and we can get to work. Mark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-us...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en.
