In April, I went to work with the TouchPACS company, to make …. well PACS’s, but shortly after I was hired we began to discuss the possibility of buying back STAIR as a foundation to build from.
It now appears, after 4 months and god knows how many hours spent, that we will be seeing my old code again. It’s weird in a way, but with us focused on EMR and the ARRA certification programs to start with, we can now better integrate with it anyway. This should make the idea that was STAIR a better proposition in the long run, since now we can scope the idea of PACS to a much larger healthcare environment. Don’t try this at home kiddies, but we will have a full PACS, so we add RIS/EMR, automating Insurance and Prescriptions, and then start tying in all the small stuff to form a ‘core workflow logic’ for a hospital of pretty much any size, and using the STAIR replication model for distribution it can run in synch across multiple locations, even multiple cities.
My role is as the Sr. Architect, which fits again since ultimately if the logic of the model fails, it will be inevitably my fault. I’m really excited to try to follow out the ideas that we came to in analysis and statistics, now that an integrated structure allows us code everything to standards. It’s really cool, and gives me the ability to know a patient’s problem, then get an image set (possibly) or lab result, then follow all the actions taken in treatment, then get a final diagnosis. So somewhere in all that is the logic of everything that happens between the time someone gets sick and the time that they are clinically diagnosed. If I can teach a computer to do structured analysis of this process, I hope I will start to find patterns, so that we can begin to consider pre-emptive medicine, at the cross-reference and research levels. It’s an awesome concept, basically building resultsets from resultsets, the foundation of learning computers.
Consequently, C# is still holding strong as my preferred language, and with VS2010 there’s a lot of new options. I think MS made the right decision with the split of the UI from the core logic code (into XAML). I don’t really like expression studio, but I can totally appreciate the power of XAML within Visual Studio. The only real limitation is that translating all of the old VS2003/2005 code up to a XAML form structure will be a pain in the ass, but it’s just work, and now that we have logical answers to standards needs, I can deal with just work.
Mike Brown, I watched your videos on celebrity wine tv, and I have to say that you have become a truly stunning example of a man of leisure…. Let me get this straight… they PAY you to do this wander around the wine country gig? That’s sick man, but power to you 🙂 For the curious, this is what I am talking about, Celebrity Wine Reviews TV. That wild looking fucker in all those videos is Mike Brown, one of the DJs I play with here in Greensboro… when he’s not out drinking his way through Europe’s wine country.
Anyway, long post, but it’s been awhile so figured I would actually bother to complete some ideas on the web tonight. If this lost you, just ignore it. Nothing to see here.
–chitlenz