To make a long story short:
I have done quite a bit of programming for my practice, built a rudimentary EMR / patient database in the past, and still use parts of my patient database to keep a flowsheet of labs.
For various reasons (mainly my interest in websites / HTML back in the 90's), I have done most of my programming and development in PHP and MySQL (I have also done database work in Microsoft Access, but don't know much Visual Basic). My lab flowsheet displays on a web page; I parse the lab data (HL7) by uploading the file and then manipulating it in PHP. It works ok, but now that I am more desktop oriented with AC (and logmein), I am thinking of porting this to a desktop format. Also more secure having these things off the cloud.
My question is: what programming platform would be easiest to learn and use for this? C++? Java? MS Access / VB? Something else?
Being in practice, I don't have oodles of time to spare, so maybe I will just leave things as they are. But given my relative ease with PHP and MySQL, does anyone (Sandeep?) have any idea how difficult it would be to port a fairly simple application that parses a text file (HL7 labdata) and dumps it into a database? Currently I use a webpage with forms to input some of the data that isn't in a file.
Thanks for any suggestions!
Michael Jacobson
NY
