I've set up a display for the waiting room in my clinic which will show patients the current waiting time for each doctor/nurse consulting that day in the clinic.
The clinic details, waiting times, and messages of the day, are displayed on a web page that can be accessed from anywhere. (You can view our page here).
The 20" display is wall mounted and linked to a computer in our reception which displays the web page. (The computer is a dumb terminal that just has firefox running - so no security concerns).
The webpage is served from a separate server (ie: not the one that runs our OSCAR EMR). The OSCAR server runs a perl script every minute which sends a data file to the web server (a one way SSH key based login allows one way traffic from OSCAR to the server without comprimising security - much as MyOSCAR does).
This data file is then called by the web pages to display the names of the providers with booked appointments for that day, and whether those providers are running late or to time. The perl script and website auto-update every minute.
This is a very useful feature for patients and staff as the patients now have a good idea of how long their wait will be and can plan accordingly, and the staff don't get pestered with requests and 'evil eye' stares from punters that are in the dark about how long they are going to have to wait.
You can download the script here and the html for the webpage here - details of how to install the script on an Ubuntu machine are included in its comments section at the start of the file.
You can use a VGA splitter (or VGA twin cable if you can keep the distance short) to feed a second monitor cable through the wall to your waiting area and wall mount the monitor (or try one of these devices to run the monitor signal over your existing ethernet/cat5 cable system). You can then start up firefox when you open up in the morning (hit F11 to make it fullscreen), and close it again when you finish.
(Updated 10th Oct 2009 to new version)
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