Slashdot Mirror

Tell ya what, if you ever make money again, you can donate it to the organization I work for and I personally vouch that we won't call you a commie.

Why yes, as a matter of fact, we're always short post-it's here at The Roanoke Rescue Mission. A case of post-it's would come in quite handy.

I think I'll bring up this online church at the next staff meeting. I'm sure the mission director, Rev. Joy, will be thrilled.

Hmmm, y'know, The mayor of Roanoke, VA has officially declared that this May is "Rescue Mission Month". We're getting local churches to announce it to their congregations. I think I'll contact the pastor of this online church and ask him to read out the weekly readings we're asking pastors to read.

OpenEMR is, overall, a good application with all the features we need. However, I'm dreading the inevitable deluge of support calls I'm going to get because of the sloppy UI. For example...

Consider this screen for scheduling an appointment for a patient. The first time I went to this screen I thought I had clicked the wrong link. It just didn't seem to be about scheduling an appointment. The most prominent form is for finding a new patient... very confusing considering that I just came from a patient record where I clicked "new appointment". Then I realized that the "new appointment" form is scrunched down in the lower right corner like a bad afterthought. Even then it's confusing. The "Time" and "Duration" fields don't line up correctly. It doesn't provide a calendar with which to juxtapose the new appointment with other appointments. If you click the "first available appointment", by default it tells you that it can't find any appointments.

OpenEMR will be much better than the dreck that they've been using down in the clinic, but it's still not good enough. Hopefully I can tweak it and submit the changes back to the development group.

Recycling old computer equipment here at the mission is a huge problem. We have a growing pile of old monitors and other computer equipment. This stuff comes to us through donations to our thrift store.

Unfortunately, most of the computer equipment that comes to us is useless. We don't sell it through our thrift store: we've found that no matter what we say, people expect technical support after buying a computer. For the most part we don't use the computers ourselves. We could start declining donations of computer equipment, but even that can be difficult to enforce... stuff has a way of slipping in anyway.

So for the time being, the equipment, especially the monitors, just keeps piling up. I've worked hard to convince my coworkers that it's wrong to just dump the monitors in the trash. Happily, this is a place where ethical concerns do count.

One idea I've had is to strip out the electronics from all the equipment and ship just the electronics to a recycler. We would trash the plastic cases. The idea is that we would drastically reduce the volume and weight of the material, thereby reducing shipping costs to something that might be profitable. Labor would be free: the addiction recovery program includes working full time at an assignment in the mission, and most of the guys are plenty handy with screwdrivers and other tools.

Has anybody has any experience with something like this? I think I could sell the idea if we even just broke even. Is there any hope for Preprocessing for Fun and Profit (especially profit)?

You've got an insightful point, but I still must disagree. Keep in mind that Microsoft builds planned obselescence into their systems, so most MS shops need to upgrade anyway. I work for the Rescue Mission of Roanoke, and as you can imagine we're not a rich organization. We desperately need to upgrade our old systems, and Linux is simply the cheaper and more cost-effective way to do it.