Hi everyone,
I'm one of the product managers at ClearCanvas, and I'm quite thrilled to see so much interest and anticipation for the release of our RIS product. I just wanted to drop everyone a line in the forums to answer some questions that I've seen posted about the RIS, and to let you know a bit more about where we are at.
First, the RIS is a pretty complicated piece of software just because of its nature as an enterprise information system. Leaving aside the challenges we have encountered developing the software, these are the challenges we have in releasing the software to the public:
The RIS is an enterprise client-server application. This means there's both a server application and a client application. Installing the server and the client is pretty much a cakewalk, since we'll be releasing the packages using NSIS. The hard part is configuring the system so that it works.
The first step is to make sure that the server and database are seeded with a workable set of authority objects. The authority design in the RIS is fairly comprehensive which means there's a great deal of configurability when it comes to what you allow and disallow when a user logs on.
The next step is to make sure that there's a suitable set of seed sample data so that you can actually play around with the system and it makes sense. We are working on a way to import this seed data into the database in a painless way for the person setting the system up.
Finally, we have to get together documentaion at a somewhat technical level how the RIS works so that if you're truly interested in using it, you will know what you're getting into. And what are you going to get as part of the RIS? A full-featured information management system for radiology that can be seamlessly integrated with the ClearCanvas Image Viewer and ClearCanvas Image Server. The three products being offered as open source software can be operated in a standalone fashion, but are also designed to really shine when you use them together.
That said, here's what the release will not include:
- Billing -- being in Ontario, Canada means that billing is somewhat more straightforward in most cases, so we have not designed a billing module. If you think this is something important and you want it, let us know and maybe we can figure something out.
- Modality Worklist -- There is a modality worklist server, but we have decided to keep that proprietary. We don't know how we're going to do it yet, but we want to sell enterprise features like Modality Worklist as proprietary software. Hey, we gotta make money somehow... and we figure that if you're someone who wants MWL, you're a pretty big player and can afford to pay us so that we can survive as a company and keep the product development going.
- HL7 processor -- same as MWL.
- Speech Recognition -- same as MWL and HL7 processor, but with the added complication that our Speech Recognition plugin uses proprietary technology from Nuance, which of course cannot be distributed for free.
Cheers,
Clinton