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Comment by mattivc | Hacker News Reader

The reason a lot of Norwegian doctors cling to their DOS interfaces is not because of age, or a resistance to upgrade.

I have discussed the topic of medical software with my father extensively, who is a M.D. in a rural town in Norway.

The reason is efficiency. As a doctor you are required to look up a lot of information on the patient, while maintaining a conversation with them. This is only really possible with a keyboard only interface. The older DOS systems does this, and the newer GUI based packages largely does not.

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I can confirm this. I have an acquiantance who is a medic, far away from Norway. He's in the same boat. A few years ago, when they switched to their new system, he mentioned to me that one of the reasons he's so unhappy with the new system is that he cannot talk to the patient while looking up his information. He has to stop and focus on the screen. This introduces some bouts of awkward silence which is all the more unpleasant when the guy you're talking to is worried about his health.

This is precisely the reason why the many GUIs I see do take care to include proper keyboard control and I doubt there's a shortage of medical software that accounts for this, although I'm not a doctor.

Maybe it's rather the resolution and small fonts that are hard to read with growing age and the developing eye cancer from looking at 240p fullscreen goodness for too long. I know it's true in my case.

Cool, someone should write an Emacs mode for them! I am very sympathetic to the arguments for using a keyboard-only interface, i try to achieve that on my own computer as much as possible, too.

I dunno. Emacs seems to have the very X+Y+Z+butt+cat kind of key combo issues that was mentioned as a problem elsewhere.

The basic benefit of these interfaces seem to be about single keys (F keys mostly) for reaching major functions.

I am guessing that once the patients id number has been entered, a single key brings up the journal, and one can page through entries (and their content) using single presses (next/prev entry, page up/down style).

> Emacs seems to have the very X+Y+Z+butt+cat kind of key combo issues that was mentioned as a problem elsewhere.

You can rebind stuff. As an example, the magit mode for rebasing has a whole bunch of one-key functions, specifically optimised for the task at hand. A "doctor-mode" might have exactly those F-keys do what you describe. But anyway, this is a case of me wanting to do everything in Emacs :P. At least that would allow the rest of the system to be upgraded, instead of running DOS(box) or whatever they do now...

Anyway, way OT.

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