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TAPAS
The Technology Assisted Practice Application Suite (TAPAS) is a model to assist primary care physicians to adopt technology in a targeted manner in their practices. TAPAS is an open source project that is designed as a set or collection of tools for primary care doctors to let them explore using ICT in their practices before transitioning to a full EMR.
TAPAS will assist physician groups explore and adopt a targeted clinical information system as part of a change management program. TAPAS is not meant to be a full EMR; rather, TAPAS is a targeted clinical information system for primary care that will be used to support the focused application of IT in clinical practice for a subset of care that is relevant to a particular physician group. For example, while sharing care through a call group, an individual TAPAS group may choose to improve maternity care, diabetes, or the appropriate sharing and access by MDs to core medical summary data for high acuity patients while on call.
TAPAS will exhibit a modular design, allowing groups of physicians to chose a module (or modules) to adopt to apply technology in their practice to a subgroup of patients, for example diabetic patients.
The physician group that is helping in the development is the North Shore Mobile Health Network. The goal of the first iteration is to build a medical summary that is syncable to the Palm PDA to help MDs while they are on call, sharing care for high acuity hospital-based patients.
Please feel free to step inside our project and get involved. There is a lot of room for feedback, discussion as well as assisting us with coding the application!
See our Mission and TAPAS Documentation for more information.
For instructions on how to setup and deploy TAPAS, see Building and Deploying TAPAS.
This wiki is here for discussion of TAPAS topics - please add to the work here.
All code is kept on Source Forge http://sourceforge.net/projects/tap-apps
TAPAS Approach
The approach in TAPAS is to provide an open-ended, modular framework which will offer a high degree of configurability, enabling a physician group to implement a domain specific healthcare tool. The first module undergoing development is the underlying core patient "summary" and is based on the Electronic Medical Summary standard from the BC Ministry of Health.
Project Plan
We are currently in the final wrap up development cycle for the funders of this project.
General phase planning documents are here TAPAS Documentation.
TAPAS Components
TAPAS is made up of several components, namely the TAPAS server (CASA), the TAPAS mobile conduit (Mozo), the rich client (Tapear), and the PDA client (Tapeta). Only the two client components are directly visible to users. The server platform CASA has been developed using a modular architecture that facilitates adding components to TAPAS instances over time, e.g., an additional thin-client.
In development, we have split up the development into three key areas: the server, the desktop client and the PDA client.
TAPEAR The Desktop Client
Tapear is the main client to be used by TAPAS users. Through it users are able to access and edit the medical summaries, and related data stored in CASA. It is a JAVA based rich client that is simply deployed and updated using Java Web Start. This means that a simple click to a Web address will install and reliably update the rich client interface. The benefit of the rich client (over a Web page, for example) is that it allows for a better user experience and better usability. Here you can get a detailed impression of the Tapear User Interface.
Several aspects of the client are described on the wiki. Here is a collection of them:
TAPETA the PDA Client
The PDA client runs on Palm OS operating system but should be highly portable to other platforms, including Windows CE and Linux Embedded, since it uses SuperWaba virtual machine technology. (Refer to our Technical Documentation for details.) Currently, Tapeta has three main functionalities:
It provides
- a viewer for secure medical summaries (in particular, medical summaries shared by call groups).
- secure messaging for clinicians
- a viewer for an on-call calendar
Much attention has been devoted on making TAPETA secure. All confidential data is encrypted on the mobile device. Thus, if the device is lost or stolen, hackers will not be able to retrieve this information.
Here is an overview of the TAPETA User Interface.
CASA - The TAPAS Server
This CASA is the Clinical Application Server Architecture. (Thanks to Joel Legris for this acronym.) While CASA is essentially the lifeblood of TAPAS, it acts in the background and, as such, is not directly visible to the user. CASA is based on open source technology and can be deployed on various different operating systems. For technical details, please refer to our Technical Documentation.
Mozo - The TAPAS Mobile Conduit
Mozo is another important component that acts in the background, almost invisible from the user's point of view. Mozo's purpose is to synchronize handheld clients (Tapeta) with CASA. Persons who are used to PDA's know that there are two principle ways for data access on the handheld, namely online data access via a wireless connection (Wifi or cell phone network) or offline data access to information that is synchronized to the handheld on a regular basis. We have decided to implement the latter, since online access requires a wifi or mobile phone connection at all times, and, thus, is still unrealistic in many areas in the country. The purpose of Mozo is to synchronize the medical summaries, messages, and calendar information to the PDA. Mozo can be accessed via a wireless network. Mozo is built upon the jSyncManager's jConduit standard. Refer to our Technical Documentation for details on the internal make-up of Mozo.
Currently, Mozo enables
- a two-way synchronization of secure messages between clinicians,
- a limited two-way synchronization of medical summaries (only the free text patient flags and notes associated with the patients are synced back to the server)
- a one-way synchronization of the on-call calendar schedule
Two-way synchronization, should the project move to that of data to and from the PDA is going to be a challenge for a number of reasons including potential data load, speed, syncing data to ensure a) no data loss and b) most acccurate representation of synced data.
TAUP
TAUP is the next generation of the TAPEAR desktop client. It is plugin-based and built on top of the netbeans platform. See TAUP Software Requirements Specification and TAPEAR Redesign for more information.
Technical Documentation
The introduction to TAPAS given on this main page is purposefully kept non-technical, in order to provide the reader with a quick overview of the system's properties.
If you are interested in contributing to TAPAS development or if you are a technician who is interested in evaluating the TAPAS system for adoption, please feel free to browse (and contribute) to our Technical Documentation.
Other Discussions
User Management
Workspaces
Security and Privacy
Development Method and Process
See this section for some description of our processes.
We have begun to document our a High Level Test Plan
Electronic Medical Summary
TAPAS is being built to support (and being supported by) the Electronic Medical Summary Project in British Columbia - a developing standard built on HL7's CDA standard to capture sharable patient summary for: consultations, emergency access and for shared on call information access. in this area we will document approaches to using the e-MS in the openTAPAS application, any extensions and challenges we have come across.
Next Steps
Following the conclusion of the initial phase of development(March 31, 2006), there remain numerous items which have yet to be implemented:
integrate the user manual in tapear (with the help button)
Create an about screen
Continued refactoring of the source code
A server installation package, downloadable from sourceforge
Update screen shots of desktop and pda client on sourceforge
Put documentation on the appropriate docs page on source forge, including user manual, and technical documentation (wiki)
Publish javadocs to wiki
Put News item on about the release and invite people to participate.
How To Get Involved
There are several ways to get involved in TAPAS. First, start by reading through the online documentation to get a sense of what we are trying to accomplish.
Join our mailing list of Sourceforge to get a sense as to what we are working through and to post questions to the group.
Add your ideas to this wiki.
If you want to get involved in the code, please review our roadmap and feel free to download the code and/or talk to our developers. Our sourceforge project is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tap-apps/
If you are testing our code and want to report a bug, you can visit our list of bugs at our sourceforge site to see if it is a known bug. We're developing a bug organization on our wiki to help you.
Remember that we are still very much in the planning stages right now and could use a lot of discussion and input.
How To Use MediaWiki
Please see the User's Guide for usage and configuration help.
Please see documentation on customizing the interface
