I&#x27;ve been volunteering in hospitals in a developing country for a while now and the information systems they use here are really bad.<p>With an eye on replacing said information systems, I&#x27;ve had a look at the open source medical records &#x2F; hospital management systems available. When I looked at the details these systems are often not great replacements. So you&#x27;re replacing aging, poorly written information systems with aging &#x2F; non user friendly &#x2F; difficult to customise information systems.<p>I would like to suggest some things for you guys:<p>1. Instead of creating one large hospital management system from scratch, how about smaller systems that can be linked together? eg. patient records system &#x2F; laboratory system &#x2F; pharmacy dispensing system &#x2F; billing system &#x2F; etc. The systems I mention here have fairly minimal dependencies between each other. This gives you the time to create a best of breed system before moving onto other stuff. It also allows hospitals to be able to use your stuff without ripping out everything they already have!<p>2. Think about how a hospital would customise your system. New fields, forms, reports, workflows, logic, etc. And how these customisations would survive an upgrade of the core system.<p>Anyway, I hope you have success with the project and I wish you luck. I&#x27;ll definitely be keeping an eye on it!