1. Motivation

There are quite a different applications of electronic data processing in health care. This results in different target users with special needs. So some kind of classification has to be done:

General practice

• The most important thing for general practitioners is a secure and trustworthy paperless practice management system. Data loss in everyday work or upon conversion to other systems is unacceptable. Patient data have to be absolutely secret and must not be viewed by third party eyes. Last but not least it must be provable that data sets are unchanged because only this makes electronic record a complete replacement of records written on paper.
• Everyday work needs easy and fast handling which enables the physician to be as fast as possible and to focus on the patient rather than on the computer.

Outpatient Care

• In terms of security and trustworthiness, the same issus as in a general practice also apply to clinical administration. However, the main focus here is secure communication between different parts of the clinic while managing a greater amount of patients.
• A very important feature is support for standardised medical record exchange.

Medical science

There are a lot of applications which might be useful for medical science. Examples where some Free Software is available or in progress of development are:

• Open platforms for telepathology
• Open environments for medical studies

Microbiology

• There are a lot of Free Software tools for the analysis of protein and DNA sequences available. Many of then are yet integrated into Debian and more and more will be added to the list of Debian packages. Unfortunately many of them are not really easy to use and have only command line interface. Though integrated user interfaces for those tools are in development.
• Portable data formats for easy exchange between the tools would be helpful to enable easy data exchange between these programs.