Hi Mark, Interesting idea for a project. My suggestion is to make your project public on bitbucket and post a wishlist right on the front page. I've found most developers will send a patch before they will take on a whole app.
My other suggestion is to work from the inside out. Focus on a notebuilder without bookmarking, social, etc. Once you go social, aren't you going to have to start worrying about HIPPA, etc... best, alan On Mar 29, 12:32 pm, Mark <joanna.m...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
