About LiNHS

About LiNHS

Just to put LiNHS into some kind of order and context, here is a suggested reading order of some of the blogs.

Welcome to the LiNHS Project
LiNHS Concept Day - Initial decisions
LiNHS Concept Day - Software choices - General Applications
LiNHS Concept Day - Software Repositories
LiNHS Concept Day - Software choices - Support Applications
LiNHS Concept Day - Software choices - Clinical Applications
LiNHS Concept Day - Desktop theme and background
LiNHS Concept Day - Default Install of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 2
LiNHS Concept Day - Basic Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 2 install
LiNHS Concept Day - Creating a basic desktop theme

LiNHS Concept Day - Default Install of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 2

Ubuntu 10.04 like previous versions of Ubuntu have a large array of pre-installed applications.



Most importantly, 10.04 has OpenOffice 3.2 pre-installed

LiNHS Concept Day - Creating a basic desktop theme

Basic changes to the look and feel.

Panels



Right click on Panel, select Properties



Select Background, Solid Colour, then adjust the transparency to about 45%, repeat for bottom panel

Theme



Right click on the desktop and select Change Desktop Background



Select Themes and then select Clearlooks then close to finish

LiNHS Concept Day - Basic Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 2 install

Starting with a really basics of an install

Install Ubuntu 10.04

United Kingdom Time Zone



Keyboard Layout, UK again



Defaults for the harddisk, only 16 GB



Username lspadmin as in local service provider, the computer name to match national standards and don't forget to scroll down a little



Ready to install





Installing/progress screens



Restart Now



Done in around 20 minutes on a Virtualbox

LiNHS Concept Day - Desktop theme and background

The look and feel of the desktop should reflect the NHS corporate colours. For example, this image used by a Scottish NHS organisation:

http://www.lanpdc.scot.nhs.uk/.../master13_background.jpg

We also felt that the menu-icon should be the NHS logo, rather than the Ubuntu logo:

LiNHS Concept Day - Software choices - Clinical Applications

List of open source healthcare software
The following is a list of software packages and applications licensed under an open source license or in the public domain for use in the healthcare industry. Software that is freely available, but not licensed under an open source license should be placed in the List of freeware health software.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_healthcare_software

We felt that clinical staff should be the ones to contribute and choose the clinical applications from those available. At first look, however, we felt that PatientOS and GnuMed were the lead candidates.

Patient OS
PatientOS (pronounced Patient-oh-es where O and S stand for Open Source) has been designed from the outset to be a Healthcare Information System (HIS). The software architecture, design patterns and framework has been built for the complexities and challenges of an enterprise wide information system. Internationalization and localization are expected, even translation into multi-byte languages such as Japanese.
http://www.patientos.org/

GnuMed
The GNUmed project builds free, liberated open source Electronic Medical Record software in multiple languages to assist and improve longitudinal care (specifically in ambulatory settings, i.e. multi-professional practices and clinics). It is made available at no charge and is capable of running on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It is developed by a handful of medical doctors and programmers from all over the world. It can be useful to anyone documenting the health of patients including, but not limited to, doctors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, acupuncturists, nurses, psychologists ... Also available via the Ubuntu Software Centre.
http://wiki.gnumed.de/bin/view/Gnumed

The following functionality is identified by Connecting for Health as required for NHS working:

Patient Administration System (PAS)

Order communications and diagnostics reporting
including all pathology and radiology tests and tests ordered in primary care

Discharge Letters with coding
discharge summaries, clinic and Accident and Emergency letters

Resource Scheduling for beds, tests, theatres, etc

E-Prescribing
including medicines for use after non-inpatients

High Resolution Image examination
Ultrasound, X-ray, MRI, etc - Aeskulap DICOM Viewer available from the Ubuntu Software Centre

Clinical Reporting System
able to produce reports from any combination of Clinical Applications

Smartcard
physical card, and authentication software - Open Smart Card Development Platform (OpenSCDP)

The Open Smart Card Development Platform (OpenSCDP) is a collection of tools for the development, test and deployment of smart card applications. It uses the capabilities of Global Platform Scripting, Profile and Messaging technology to provide unparalleled flexibility and development speed.
http://www.openscdp.org/

OpenSC-Project is similar and available through the Ubuntu Repository

http://www.opensc-project.org

LiNHS Concept Day - Software choices - Support Applications

For all support services

• Information Technology
• Estates and Facilities Management
• patient complaints
• risk management
• etc

For each of those listed above, specific application(s) will be required for the following:

• Service Desk
• Contracts Management
• Purchasing
• Stock control
• Salaries and Wages
• Human Resources

IT Service Desk solutions
http://www.opensourcehelpdesklist.com/
Ideally the final product selected should provide all ITIL v3 functionality within the application.

Helpdesk Reloaded is the closest to what is required within the NHS:

• Free Help Desk Software, No cost to you.
• Easy to Install with the help desk installation wizard.
• Based on PHP and using the free database software MySQL
• No programming or database knowledge required. We have built in all the features you need in the help desk's web based GUI.
• Updated Frequently we normally release new version every other week.
• We are interested in implementing your ideas. If you have a good idea for a feature on the help desk software, let us know. We listen.

Payroll, Human Resources and Enterprise Resource Planning
Postbooks seems to be the lead currently available:
PostBooks is an open source business software package that offers a total solution for managing your business, including fully-integrated accounting, CRM and ERP modules. Designed for businesses looking for an alternative to - or a growth path from - commercial desktop
accounting packages such as Quickbooks and Peachtree, PostBooks rivals sophisticated commercial ERP platforms, offering higher quality at a much lower cost.

PostBooks, like most ERP applications, is organized by functional areas, or modules, described below. These modules are highly interconnected and integrated, but you can customize which modules - even which individual tasks - each of your staff is authorized to use.
http://www.osalt.com/postbooks

LiNHS Concept Day - Software Repositories

We agreed that there should be a tiered NHS Repository approach which is free and available, and also available via an external mirror site.

The tiering should be

1. Local Repository visible at the end user desktop
2. Local Repository backfilled from NHS Repository on the NHS intranet, mirrored on an internet site
   
3. NHS Repository backfilled from Ubuntu repository, and other suppliers' repositories

LiNHS Concept Day - Software choices - General Applications

Office Productivity Suite
We felt that OpenOffice was the logical choice for an office productivity suite, as this provides best document compatibility with the current NHS preferred product (Microsoft Office 2007/2003).

Calendar/Scheduling/Resourcing/Messaging (e-mail, instant messaging, SMS, etc)
Evolution and Empathy are pre-installed on Ubuntu.

Reporting
It was felt that an application to directly connect to data warehouses would be useful, in the mould of Crystal Reports. We initially opted for JasperReports. This is a powerful open source Java reporting tool that has the ability to deliver rich content onto the screen, to the printer or into PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV, XML and even flash (swf) files. It is entirely written in Java and can be used in a variety of Java enabled applications, including J2EE or Web applications, to generate dynamic content. Its main purpose is to help creating page oriented, ready to print documents in a simple and flexible manner.

Project Management
Planner provides project planning and scheduling together with resource management.
http://live.gnome.org/Planner and available via the Ubuntu Software Centre



Image manipulation
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It is also available via the Ubuntu Software Centre.



Terminal Software
Built into Ubuntu



File Transfer, archiving and recovery
Use Nautilus, which is built into Ubuntu.

Web Browser
Firefox , which is built into the current distribution of Ubuntu.

LiNHS Concept Day - Initial decisions

LiNHS Mission Statement

The provision of healthcare should be supported by infrastructure which is

• secure
• stable
• efficient
• effective
• easy to use
• flexible, to meet the needs of evolving services

Based on this, we initiated the LiNHS project.

Partition size - 16GB initially
for ruggedised laptops, solid drives and bootable USB memory sticks there will be a cost step, hence the decision to initially start with a 16GB partition with the hope that we can keep this down to 8GB in the final build.

Virtual Machine
To ease development and use of Configuration Management principles, we decided to build the image within a SUN Virtualbox.

Linux Distribution selection
We considered various Linux distributions and opted for Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx). This was because of its generally accepted good user experience, and 10.4 is the latest Long Term Support version, which means 3 years support on Ubuntu Desktop (April 2015), and 5 years on Ubuntu Server (April 2017). A new LTS version is usually released every 2 years. 32 bit and 64 bit versions of this distro are available.

Software Choices
Building on research prior to the Concept Day:
http://www.kynson.org.uk/penguin/healthcare.htm
We considered the software options for each software requirement.

Tools : Open Smart Card Development Platform

The Open Smart Card Development Platform (OpenSCDP) is a collection of tools for the development, test and deployment of smart card applications. It uses the capabilities of Global Platform Scripting, Profile and Messaging technology to provide unparalleled flexibility and development speed.

(read more)