Now is the time
If you've been waiting for an invitation to help with the newest iteration of FreeMED or wondering how you can help -- W E N E E D Y O U --
We are nearing a pre-release of the 0.9.x series. It is a radical departure from the previous iterations with many more features and abilities.
If you are interested in doing clinical correlate work, contact Dr Volker Bradley for more information. We will ask for non disclosure agreements so that release is seamless, and a CLA (Contributors License Agreement) so that all work becomes part of the GPL.
To whet your appetite some of the newer features include the ability to tag and aggregate patients independent of diagnosis or care. Plan of care is also a new feature as well as a worklist, enabling you, the provider, to see what you have outstanding to do (finish a note, write a report) for each patient.
Scheduling and billing too have a new and more seamless look. If you are a biller or wish to have input into the look and feel of the UI for billing, please write to Dr. Daniel D'Andrea who will direct and help.
I would be remiss not mentioning the contributions of Phil Meng of Austria in working with and maintaining the translations for FreeMED.
FreeMED is only as strong as our community.
Irving J. Buchbinder, DPM, DAPBS
Director, FreeMED Software Foundation
Does it do things like multiple procedures entered all at once? A chiro might do four or five separate procedures on a patient, and they do those procedures visit after visit. The office staff wants to see a list of last visit's procedures, possibly change them, submit them, get a "balance for today", enter a payment, and print a receipt.
And ... I don't mean to whine, but .... is it still written in PHP? I've had lots of no fun hacking on 0.8.4 trying to get it to do the things listed above. Maybe I'm just getting old and calcified, or maybe Python really *is* that much better than everything else, but I keep saying to myself "Boy, this would be easier in Python".
See below...
It's not what you write it in, but how you write it. Object oriented PHP is just as capable as Python, without the obnoxious forced indentation (I'm not a fan of semantically relevant whitespace).
Turns out what what you are complaining about is the lack of separation between the UI and data model, a problem which we have solved for the 0.9.x series, featuring a complete rewrite of the underlying architecture to make things like multiple procedure entry a piece of cake.
But, if you don't feel like waiting for 0.9.x, you can always grab a copy of the multiple procedures module, which is a UI frontend allowing exactly what you're asking for, written for the 0.8.x series.
Jeff Buchbinder
Project Head
FreeMED Software Foundation, Inc
http://freemedsoftware.org/
The problem with PHP is that it wasn't designed. It "just happened" with features added willy-nilly. It really *isn't* just as capable as Python. And about the indentation ... you were going to indent your code anyway, weren't you? So why add syntactical sugar which goes hand in hand with indentation only the indentation (which is obvious) is meaningless; it's the braces which actually have the meaning. Python's freedom from "you didn't match your braces" gives you one less thing you can do wrong.
The biggest advantage of PHP -- that you can embed it inside HTML -- is completely lost when you separate your UI and data model. Templating -- completely necessary for sanity -- takes away any advantage of PHP.
The other advantages of PHP turn out to be security holes, like include $variable, or register_globals.
Anyway, at this point I'm just whining -- I know I'm not going to change your mind.
The multiple procedures modules doesn't do exactly what I'm asking for, because it doesn't default to the previous set of procedures. It's not designed for an office which does repeated procedures, like a chiropractor, physical therapist, or theraputic masseuse.