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[LUG] funded project, doctors need communication system



There are about 1000 GPs in Devon, divided into 200 practices.
The LMC (local medical ctee) is the political organisation and has a stack of 
other functions as well.  There are two main fragments of the LMC, North East 
and South West, and each has 2 to 5 subgroups.

These have meetings, prepare papers and discuss things amongst themselves and 
with their constituents.

There is an LMC Secretariat, which has technical expertise although mainly in 
Microsoft Office, it runs a mail system on VPOP3 supplied and maintained by 
me, and has SOPHOS antivirus updates provided as part of a general contract 
for GPs and parts of the NHS.  (SOPHOS includes Unix and Linux antivirus 
software)

The secretariat may move, and might acquire a fixed data connection or ISDN, 
but at the moment is on POTS.


All Practices have ISDN with a 64k router connection, this is secured 
probably adequately from anyone _outside_ the NHS.  Few GPs have ISDN at 
home, many LMC members and GPs would do any such communicating from home 
rather than the practice (IE there is a bandwidth limit).

Presently the LMC operates a website which is widely admired and used by 
other LMCs - we lead the field.  There are 500 other LMCs in the UK.
http://www.devonlmc.org

The website is currently hosted on CIX/Nextra who have been satisfactory 
throughout.

The LMCs have used CIX in the past, but for various (FUD and financial) 
reasons use lapsed around the time of internetworking the NHS.  CIX has the 
brilliant Ameol2 off line reader, however this doesn't synchronise well 
across two computers, one at work in the office and one (at work) at home, 
and one has to pay a CIX subscription per month per person using it.

Requirements
---------------------
The LMC wants to be able to run a threaded discussion protected by password 
security.
In my view the connections should use SSL/ssh or similar security, since 
matters discussed might touch on patient information that would allow 
inference attacks, and also since NHS sysadmins should not be tempted to 
allow anyone access to such streams of information.

Speed is of the essence, and a system that shows more than one message on a 
page may be preferable to one that calls for a new page for each message.  

The population involved is technically inept, time-pressured, irritable, bad 
at typing.  IE this thing needs to be pretty simple.

Further to that, I see a need for a collaborative document preparation, 
manual updating and generally holding easily-alterable pages in common.  THis 
is not the immediate need but should be considered.

Costs
---------
Cost is relevant, but this is not expected to be free, it is expected to be 
highly reliable, and to be looked after.  GPs and their staff are well-known 
to be hard to support (it isn't clear why, but compared to other SMEs the 
help-desk effort involved in GP system software has been historically 
regarded as high)

I'd welcome general discussion, but what I really want is a bid to provide 
this, working in two months or less, and with costings for the first two 
years and a convincing account of why the support can be expected to be 
reliable.  I'll split the chore of explaining that libre software is more 
persistent in time than closed source, _if_ the bids are open source ones, 
and I'll express a personal preference for open source, and note that there 
is no actual bias against it in the organisation as a whole.

Talk to me today on 01392 213692 if you like.

-- 
From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley 
http://www.defoam.net/             

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