An Interview with Bourek Ales, Medical Doctor - Gynecologist

III. OB./GYN. Clinic, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Reprinted with Permission

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askSam: What is your role within your organization?

BOUREK ALES:  I am the head of the division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Intensive Care Unit.

askSam: Can you tell us how you use askSam?

BOUREK ALES: I have been using askSam since ver. 4.01 for DOS which I discovered when working in Tunisia. Now I use both askSam for DOS version 5.0 (most of the time) and version 2.0 for Windows.

I have used askSam for all patient data handling. I also work as assistant professor in obstetrics and gynecology and so I use askSam for educational purposes, knowledge acquisition, storage and presentation. When I studied for my Board exams, I used askSam for note-taking and the

gynecology file keeps growing and my students use it as a hyper-book.

I have also made a small free-form database for assisted reproduction management which uses a lot of askSam batch file possibilities to keep the amount of data small. askSam cares for my personal documents, letters, laboratory forms and protocols, MEDLINE, CCOD and WWW document archiving and searching. I sincerely hope you will keep developing the product.

askSam: How has askSam made your job any easier, faster or more efficient?

BOUREK ALES:  Medical data is almost impossible to structure into any standard form database. askSam lets you grab knowledge as it comes, defining fields on the run. It only pushes you to make intelligent queries when you are trying to extract or analyze the captured data. The surest way to loose unexpected and interesting medical information (eg. the delivery of septuplets) is the lack of a field for this event in a traditional database. Saving this information in a free text field does not usually allow for boolean searches in a standard database. In this respect you cannot beat askSam.

askSam:  What type of tech support have you received?

Bourek Ales: Being in the Czech Republic, I have never received any, but actually I have not needed any for running the software for the needs I have. The incorporated help has covered all of my needs. "Decompilation" of some of the sample programs shipped with askSam has been a valuable source, especially for some more tricky possibilities like the relational capability of askSam. This I use for linking patient records with other askSam data based on patients social security numbers.

askSam: Would you recommend askSam and why?

Bourek Ales: I recommend askSam all of the time, and plenty of my foreign colleagues are using it now. I have presented it at the IMIA /International Medical Informatics Association conference in 1992/, where it generated quite some interest.

askSam:  What applications do you plan for askSam in the future?

Bourek Ales:  At this moment, I'm planning to use askSam for tasks of the Czech Medical Council and for my Ph.D. work on using medical informatics in assisted reproduction.  I have also loaded askSam on my Hewlett Packard 200LX palmtop (a PC-XT compatible with 6 MB of RAM and DOS ver.5) and so I am able to carry all of my patient records and medical data with me all the time. Try it - I am sure you will like it.

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Bourek Ales

III. OB./GYN. Clinic, Masaryk University, Brno.

Bulharska 33, 612 00 Brno, Czech Republic, Europe

Email: bourek@med.muni.cz

URL: http://www.med.muni.cz/~bourek