alt Hacker NewsI worked with a physician's office in 2006, and the lead physician had cobbled together a system for patient tracking using Visual FoxPro. It was a monstrosity, and using it over a network drive gave all sorts of file locks and issues with multiple people changing the same record (usually the physician and front of house staff when checking the patient out).
I finally got the physician to switch to a proper client/server architecture using .NET WinForms and ASP.NET RPC calls. All issues went away, and I was even able to allow staff members to edit the interface to set what mattered to them most at the top of the application, by building the lab testing form in XML so they could move the X/Y coordinates to where they wanted them. It wasn't even a feature I had thought of, just a physician looking through the technology and figuring out how it worked (luckily the business and security logic were on the server, so a bad actor could only have destroyed their own local copy of the app).
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DBase/Fox Pro were born when local networks weren't common, it excelled as a single-user batteries-included IDE. Now that you mention this, I understand why it couldn't work these days as it is.
I also think it won't be that hard to make it multiuser, that's a long-ago solved problem these days.
One fear I saw manifest in a job was before AI, and an associate was doing a screen for a request in dot net and it let the user read the record, edit the record and write the record. Last person to write the record won of course.
At this tier of small time company IT, I am hoping that AI will actually improve the quality of code, because people who write racey nolock code that occasionally "drops a few records" are probably hopefully not posting their code to forums or alternatively getting roasted to pieces if they do so its my hope they are only represented in training data as "what not to do."
When networked PCs and rapid application development platforms became popular there was a "Cambrian explosion" of custom electronic health record and practice management applications built by doctor hackers who knew exactly what they wanted, and had just barely enough technical skill to sort of make it partially work. Those have gradually died off because commercial products kept improving, and the cost of complying with security and interoperability requirements kept escalating. But I predict that the cycle will now repeat because the combination of AI coding tools plus headless EHR platforms (built in security, storage, and APIs) has made it easier to build a custom EHR that actually works.