Re: Multiple Cocoa Applications within one
Re: Multiple Cocoa Applications within one
- Subject: Re: Multiple Cocoa Applications within one
- From: Bill Cheeseman <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 03 May 2007 17:37:02 -0400
- Thread-topic: Multiple Cocoa Applications within one
on 2007-05-03 4:12 PM, Nathan Busch at email@hidden wrote:
> I have a friend who is a psychiatrist and wants to have a Macintosh-
> based application to help her manage her practice: patient notes;
> daily schedule; accounting; patient file management; etc. So my
> introduction to Cocoa development.
This is a truly great project, and a good product will make money.
But I fear that it should only be tackled by an experienced Cocoa developer,
or somebody who can wait a couple of years for the finished product. I have
a friend with exactly the same need -- she's sometimes known as my wife. But
I don't dare to take on a project of this magnitude by myself, even though
I've been doing Cocoa development for several years.
For the accounting/billing/database part of it, you would want to look at
Cocoa's Core Data technology, which is generally not considered to be
something for Cocoa beginners to tackle.
Another hurdle is that you need to understand the legal requirements imposed
on medical professionals by HIPPA. Patient notes have to be secure against
intrusion, and they also have to be kept intact for a period of years. Both
the security and the backup parts of this requirement will pose some
harder-than-usual Cocoa issues for you. The potential legal liabilities if
you get this wrong are enormous.
And for billing, you have to be able to print insurance reimbursement forms.
Thankfully, the insurance industry is standardizing the forms next month.
But you'll have to find out what the standards are, then learn how to make
Cocoa print the forms so the characters appear in the right place. Printing
forms like this is another harder-than-usual Cocoa issue.
For Mac users, the current industry-standard psychotherapy billing/patient
notes software product is Saner Software's "ShrinkRapt," moving to version 6
any day now. It's based on the 4D database engine, and it's very clunky. But
it's been around for years, and it does the job. You should tell your friend
about it, so there'll be something to work with while you're working on this
project.
To get back on topic, anybody who has used ShrinkRapt will agree that a
nicely done Cocoa replacement would be a boon to the mental health of us
all. But, man, are you taking on a big job. Good luck!
--
Bill Cheeseman
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