Project Leader: Dr. Molly Cheah
Recipient Institution: Primary Care Doctors' Organisation Malaysia (PCDOM) 
Amount: USD 30,000
Duration: 12 Months
Commencement Date: 2006

Project Abstract

PrimaCare is an open source medical software that focuses on the clinical and operational aspects of the medical practice from the perspective of a multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary approach. PCDOM has developed a common platform addressing the general aspects of primary health care, which mainly deals with Adult Medicine.

At this stage of PrimaCare, PCDOM has developed a general cross-platform using open source resources including Apache Server, PostgresSQL database and PHP 5 scripting for interactivity. The current system consists of nine modules: system administration; clinic management; financial management; patient management; prescription management; billing management; schedule management; asset and supplies management; and medical resources.

As next steps, there is a joint agreement among medical users and ICT programmers to develop specialized modules in other areas of primary health care, such as General Pediatrics, General Women’s Health and Basic Epidemiology. PCDOM will develop a Generic Engine for Modules (GEM) software that will help develop modules by providing databases, business logics, user interfaces, report templates, etc.

Once developed GEM will empower medical expert developers who are non-programmers to build or expand their own modules instead of relying on programmers to perform the hard coding.