EBME Forums Forums Management Medical Equipment Management Medical Equipment Maintenance Management Software

Hi Geoff,

I've seen the screenies of your program and it is really quite good. I'm really tempted to use Visual Foxpro but if i do it'll be as a personnal endeavor. I'm grappling with Access right now and its "features" are keeping me busy. Its still not official as to what direction we'll be going with the database but it appears we are keeping the Access license on my machine only because of the medical equipment database. so, we'll see what happens in the near future.

Thanks for your kind remarks, Alan. To my mind, all coding is time well spent, whatever the language and platform. I assume that you’re younger than me (most people are these days), so be warned, if you don’t already know, about the time it all takes. I’m sure that Huw will agree!

People who don’t code just look at the finished work, but don’t have a clue about the amount of effort it all took. My own modest projects must have run into literally thousands of hours over the years (and I’m still at it now, on this lovely Bank Holiday Monday).

So, if you’re still not far from just starting out, it pays (in the long run) to get on the right path, as it were. Twenty-five years ago now, whilst at the stage of BBC BASIC, I was advised by a good old boy to learn C, and code in C. Then I was advised to get out of medical equipment, and get into PC’s (don’t forget they were just emerging then, and my hero was Peter Norton). Of course, I was "too busy" at the time, but certainly regret now that I wasn’t able to follow those two good pieces of advice!

By all means pursue coding as a personal pursuit, or hobby. Especially as, rest assured, your "bosses" will never appreciate your efforts!

We use EMAT here at MYHT and I know Ascribe who we co-developed this system with are looking into entering the far East market so it may be worth getting intouch with them @ www.ascribe.com

This should be of interest to all you guys doing OSS. IPEM are hosting a meeting on 7th November titled 'Can open source software be used for clinical work?' See link below for details and a provisional program etc...

http://www.ipem.ac.uk/ipem%5Fpublic/article.asp?id=397&did=49&aid=2679&st=&oaid=-1

John

That’s an interesting, John, but I would have to say that establishing a link from equipment maintenance software to "affecting patient outcomes" would be a bit of a challenge even for the most creative of Ambulance Chasers (or so I hope, anyway ... if not, then all is lost)!

True Geoff but I did not think it worth starting a new thread just for this odd bit of info.

Dear freinds, am in a hospital in Uganda which has branches lets say 20 branches but i what to have a database /inventory of all the equipment in the hospitals,name of manufacturer and contacts, when its gonna be serviced, spares required to be stocked,when it was manufactured, lets talk of 50 machines each hospital, which software can i use such that i can have proper equipment management .

Thanks for your ideas Roman.

You can check out this website, roman. My stuff is Open Source, in the Public Domain, or otherwise freely available to anyone in need of it, just as long as they let me know about any bugs they've found, together with suggestions for further development. Useful changes can be made easily enough.

If you have any data already available, in whatever format, I can usually knock it into a suitable data-set. If not, then you would have to do more of the data entry, editing, deletions etc. yourself.

There are a number of commercially available systems, roman, so you pay your money and take your choice with those. I'm not knocking any of them (as I appreciate the amount of effort they take to produce). But I would value feedback about my own stuff, in readiness for the next system, which is lurking about in the back of my mind.

Meanwhile, I quite like this post that I tripped over whilst trawling through the murky back corridors of the ebme archives:-



It's certainly a whole lot cheaper, and far less time-consuming too! Check out the complete thread if you like.

Where are you now, Chris? We haven't heard from you for a while, Mate?