African free software developers have released early versions of a free hospital pharmacy management system. The developers that initiated the project were part of a three week-long developer workshop at the University of the Western Cape(UWC) recently.
Free Software Innovation Unit(FSIU) manager Paul Scott says the idea to develop the system came from a request at a previous workshop held at the university. Scott says Mohammed Sonday, chief pharmacist at the GF Jooste Healthcare Project, approached the FSIU at UWC in September last year to ask if the FSIU could create a system to replace the outdated Microsoft Access system that they were using to run their pharmacy operations.
The project was scoped and specifications designed during the workshop, and the software was developed by the workshop participants. Scott says the software is almost complete, with only a few things remaining to be done.
The development of KHospPharm is part of the Kinky application framework being actively developed by developers at UWC.
The completed software will be available for download from the AVOIR website at http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/ as soon as it has been tested. Development versions can be checked out of cvs as part of the KEWL.NextGen code at cvs.uwc.ac.za, using anoncvs as both username and password.
For further information and for sourcecode see the AVOIR website at http://avoir.uwc.ac.za. Working versions of Kewl.NextGenFor can be found at http://kngforge.uwc.ac.za/kng_unstable.