Patient tracking systems currently in use are expensive, cumbersome, and rarely designed with the user in mind. emerg-med is designed and built by an emergency physician and a professional software engineer.

The user interface (‘user experience’) is critical in emergency care as the number of separate staff : computer interactions is very high, staff turnover is high, and therefore a system that is not intuitive will be annoying, slow and will waste expensive staff time.

The design criteria for emerg-med were therefore that the system must be web-based, simple to use and must run on a secure platform. It should have low resource requirements, so that it would run on low-cost, energy-efficient hardware, such as the Raspberry Pi.

emerg-med evolved from a PHP/ MySQL system originally written for use in Australian hospitals in 2002, and was then used in the NHS, but has now been rewritten in Python/ Django/ MySQL. It will be available as a Docker application or for installation on an existing server e.g. Ubuntu 16.4 LTS, Raspian.

emerg-med software will be released in 2018 under a liberal Open Source licence e.g. MIT licence.