Here is Grand Rounds for the week of September 26th, 2005. It's the 1-year anniversary of Grand Rounds - and I want to thank Nick for setting up and coordinating this weekly review of medical weblogs. Grand Rounds has grown enormously over the past year .. and augments our medical weblog aggregator (medlogs.com) quite well. Here's an archive of all of the previous Grand Rounds editions.</intro>
Nick thoughtfully asked me to host this week's edition - even though I've not been as active with posting for the past 6 months or so. He thought I was the first medical blogger - but in fact, that was David Theige who hosted MedEdNews beginning in 1998. My blog - Family Medicine Notes - was started in earnest in early 1999 - but the current site has archives going back to November of 1999.
Grand Rounds this week will be a bit of a history of medical weblogging - with appropriate (I hope) mention of some of the current issues and recent posts of interest.
Continue reading "Grand Rounds #53 Published" »
Bruce gave me a hard time about the Switchvox review (yeh .. I'll finish it) because there was no good introduction to exactly what the system is - and why I would want it.
Here's an intro paragraph:
Asterisk is an open-source phone system. It replaces the Nortel or NEC or Siemens Oro whatever) system that you have in your office.
Why would you want to replace your current system? Well .. because it's old and hard to change settings and/or maybe it is just time to upgrage and you are shopping around. In our case - it's that the old system (a perfectly functional Nortel Meridian Sytem with Voicemail and ~10 extensions) didn't do some thing that we wanted - and we're tired of struggling with configuration changes that take either a long time to learn - or $90/hr to pay the local phone guys to come and help when we are over our heads.
Asterisk is great and has many features. It does all of the things that your current phone systems does .. like answer the phone .. route calls to extensions, etc. There are two things that make Asterisk different from most systems:
- It usues VOIP
- It is free
Continue reading "PBX for the Medical Office" »
9-12-05 Update: I've posted an introduction to this review - as I had some feedback that I didn't introduce the concept of VOIP very well (at all).
Tom's Hardware Guide recently reviewed the Asterisk @ home system. AAH was the first system that I used to implement Asterisk, and enabled me to learn about this wonderful open-source PBX. This review will cover a commercial implementation of Asterisk - SwitchVox - from Four Loop Technologies
Implementing Asterisk with AAH is reasonably easy for someone with moderate technical skills – and I have previously been able to set up a home phone system without too much trouble. Over the course of a few months last Spring, I learned enough about the innards of Asterisk to understand the potential of the software, and developed a rough model for how it might be used to enhance the functions of a medical office. ...
Continue reading "SwitchVox Review - Part I" »
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