[CentOS] OT: Suggestions for database for physicians patientrecords?

[Ross S. W. Walker]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org 
> [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Lanny Marcus
> Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 7:49 AM
> To: CentOS Mailing List
> Subject: [CentOS] OT: Suggestions for database for physicians 
> patientrecords?
> 
> This is very OT. If list readers can point me in the right 
> direction, to
> other mailing lists, or web sites for recommended databases, that will
> be much appreciated!
> 
> My wife's doctor wants to move records, for approximately 
> 6000 patients
> (over a 12 year period), from paper (18th century) to a database (20th
> century). The data entry will be a PITA, for his secretaries, 
> regardless
> of what software he goes with. I did some reading about MySQL, and I
> also did some googling for Linux+database and there are many other
> databases out there. One requirement is that one field be variable
> length (patient history: surgeries, treatments, etc.), which I suspect
> might vary from 200 words to 3000 words. That field size needs to be
> very flexible. If there are "front ends" that will make it easier for
> his secretaries to input patient records to the database and 
> access it,
> that will be a "plus". It would also be a plus, but, it's not 
> mandatory,
> if they can do this in Spanish. It's a small office (2 
> surgeons, nurses
> and secretaries) so I suspect there might be 4 to 6 workstations
> connected to the database server, maximum. I would like to 
> help him get
> the best possible solution. Something with a large user base, 
> excellent
> documentation and an active ML, like CentOS, is the goal. Thanks much!
> Lanny

There are numerous systems out there, but what I would look for is more
on a document management system then specifically a database.

If it were myself doing this I would look at some way to take a scan of
a medical record into PDF with an OCR that will create a PDF text overlay
so it can be indexed into a database and become fully searchable.

I saw an OCR engine for Linux, a port of a popular commercial OCR engine,
I think it was distributed by Vividata called OCR Shop XTR, it's command-line
driven and is designed for working with large batches at once, I think it
is around $5K. Combine that with a photocopier that scans into PDFs and
dumps it to a samba share which feeds it into the software and after a tuning
period you can crank those 6K files into PDFs that can be fully imported into
just about any document management system out there.

-Ross

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