Project Information

Agreed Goals

The goals of EGADSS are to:

• design a standards based open source web services application to assist with clinical decision support in primary care electronic medical record systems.
• begin to develop a community around the EGADSS platform that consists of EMR vendors, academics, content providers and policy makers such that the EGADSS platform can grow from a basic reminder system to a more robust system in the future.

Environment

What is the system's business environment?

The EGADSS software will run in a family physicians office that runs a clinical information system such as an EMR. It is not envisioned that EGADSS, in this iteration, will run at an enterprise level.

EGADSS will support EMRs by providing patient specific reminders, it will be available freely under the GPL license.

What is the system's physical environment?

This system will run as a web service and will run either on the same machine as the clinical information system or on a machine in a co-located with the EMR system server(s)

What is the system's technology environment (hardware and software)?

EGADSS will be developed so that it is platform independent (i.e. can run on Windows, Linux and other *nix platforms). It will coincide with the minimum requirements for JAVA 1.4. Initial development will be on Linux.

Stakeholders / Actors

Physicians

Physicians will be using the EMR system. Clinically they will not interact with EGADSS directly, however, their key needs include:

1. Access to timely information
2. Information that is targeted to the decision making that is occurring at that time and with that patient
3. Accurate information to support their clinical decision making

System Administrators

Systems administrators will need to be able to update and manage the EGADSS server.

Knowledge Administrators

Knowledge administrators, for the initial phases of EGADSS will be part of the EGADSS development team. They will need to have access to the collection of guidelines and be able to administer the knowledge base.

Performance and Capacity Needs

Because EGADSS will be run locally, the following are the expected performance and capacity needs:

• There will be no mre than 100 users of the system at any one time
• EGADSS may be called 1-3 times per patient encounter
• Each clinical encounter will last at least 8 minutes, therefore the system will be responding to an average of 40 requests per minute.
• EGADSS will have to respond to each request in sub seconds. Any perceived delay will cause the user / vendor to abandon the system.
• The EMR system may chose to run reports through EGADSS in the evening on a large number of patients (in the 1000s to 10,000s). This will be asynchronous.