Another REAL Aussie
Dr Gerard Hammond
We have used RB since 1998 to create software for our 560+ Sydney scientists here at the Garvan Institute of Medical research in Darlinghurst.
We currently have deployed about 15 scientific apps. Could be more - I forget them all...
They have aways been pretty nice Macintosh and Windows clients (remember MacOS 7 - I do...) and
remarkably have survived the transition from Motorola->PPC->Intel chipsets. Well done REALsoftware!
Some apps have PHP sister versions which tend to be bleak and barren compared to our spiffy native apps and the PHP code tends to look like someone sneezed on my Mac monitor.
We are very much looking forward to RB-WEB as we can re-use a ton of well maintained and hardened RB code.
Our apps already share a "framework" of 13 years of code as external classes and modules. Our framework makes it really easy to start a project.
So, we mainly deal with Patient clinical info, leading to statistical analyses and scientific publications.
Demographics, blood tests, tissue freezer location, pathology details and lately genetic testing. Think Radiotherapy, chemo, Surgery, DNA etc etc etc
Our users are mainly in-house scientists, doctors, pathologists but recently remote nurses (in Dubbo, Perth, Adelaide as well as sites in Italy, USA and Canada). A great bunch of people to have as clients. Over the years we have gotten many gifts because we added a particular field for them in their database.
Our minimum bribe level is one Darlinghurst cappuccino.
One of the problems with Science software is that the scientist might only have 2-3 years of minuscule funding. So we here in Bio IT have had to be careful about which projects we take on.
I am happy to report that the first 1998 software is still being used daily. It was used to test for drug cheats during the Sydney 2000 olympics
Most of our RB apps deal with disease progression (Breast, Prostate, Ovary, Lung Cancer etc) but we also do some boring admin apps, such as recording $$$ for successful Grants and auditing for publication counts. We try to stay steely focused on science apps and dodge administration apps.
Garvan is a non-profit medical research institute. Our apps have been so well received we now have 4 full-time RB coders.
Cheers.
Dr Gerard Hammond
Software Architect
Garvan Institute of Medical Research