Cottage Med Open Source EMR

[CountryDoc]

I've posted on other sites regarding Filemaker vs. Access as programming solutions for several EMR efforts including our own. The programming community generally consider Filemaker easier to program with a faster more intuitive learning curve.

Access has a more powerful back end database but Filemaker can scale to terabytes of information and interfaces with ODBC, SQL, and several other database standards.

The final kicker is that Filemaker runs on Linux, Mac's, and windows at the same time. Access only runs on Microsoft machines. We have macs for better security with most ease of use, so we had to use Filemaker for our CottageMed EMR in the above postings.

I'm absolutely thrilled with how fast we've progressed with so little effort over the last three years - working full time instead of seeing patients I'd probably have all the functionality of ComChart and other proprietary systems by now. Filemaker is a great programming environment - consider it to be a cross-platform Access with much greater ease of use.

[mel]

Welcome aboard countrydoc :D

[alborg]

Welcome, CountryDoc!


I've posted on other sites regarding Filemaker vs. Access as programming solutions for several EMR efforts including our own. The programming community generally consider Filemaker easier to program with a faster more intuitive learning curve.

Two years ago, I would have argued your premise, but unfortunately, the direction that Microsoft has taken with its Office product has been in the direction opposite of where most small programmers are going.

Positive aspects of MS Office include the interoperability of the various products, s.a. Access / Word / Excel. There has historically been more literature on these products, especially Access, than there have been for Filemaker Pro. For years Visual Basic languages have ruled the developmental world.

Now, though, Filemaker Pro (FP) is catching up on the literature aspect- in any Borders or Barnes & Noble you'll see a whole (small) section on FP. It's retained its simplicity, while MS Office has gone to the 'net environment requiring Visio if you desire to make it into a "runtime" developer version. It doesn't have the dreaded "product activation" that Microsoft introduced, limiting one to using the product on only two computers.

Access has a more powerful back end database but Filemaker can scale to terabytes of information and interfaces with ODBC, SQL, and several other database standards.

Well, both can interface with these standards, but it's good that FP can also show this power!


The final kicker is that Filemaker runs on Linux, Mac's, and windows at the same time. Access only runs on Microsoft machines.

It's like voting for the "Green Party" in the upcoming elections- an interesting concept, but not very popular. Linux is even less popular than Kerry...


...so we had to use Filemaker for our CottageMed EMR in the above postings.

Love your website... really shows off your software well. Much better than many $10000.00 sites, BTW. Congratulations... :o

Regards,
Al