[Gnumed-devel] gmReferrals.py - Comments please from LOTZ OF PEOPLE

[richard terry]

Some general comments re this one, and please could I get feedback from 
multiple people, I'll explain below why, as there are many options in the 
design.

This module has always worked brilliantly in my medical records program, but 
I'd like to make the following comments. The 'For' line exists because in 
australia we have certain regulations about referrals to specialist. it can 
be 'an opinon', 'continuing management', 'indefinate referral', to which I 
added things 'feedback' 'education' (eg where referring to a diabetic 
education service etc', and one would also add 'legal report...' etc. Very 
flexible.

1)It was originally designed to allow full entry of a new 
organisation/person/clinic etc. What happened was the program when faced with 
a non-existant person added the person, checked in the organisation existed, 
if it did, linked the person to the organisation, or created it first if non 
existant. One has to fill in a category if non existant.

One can search by doctor surname and up pops the pick list, or search by 
category eg if one types in Surgeon, all the surgeons pop up and you select 
the one you want. If a person/organisation has more than one address, the 
default (more commonly used - weighted) address pops into the text boxes, but 
if one clicks on say the street line, up pops a list of all the other street 
addresses which exist for this person/organisation and one can scroll down 
and select one.  Additionally one should be able to search on this screen by 
say typing in the postcode, then the category say surgeon and up will pop a 
list of only the surgeons in that postcode, similarly one could type in a 
town and up will pop the names of all the surgeons in that town.

You can see how flexible this screen can be to make our lives easy.

Q)Do you think the on screen editing should be allowed, or should we just have 
a single street line, and only allow entry of person and organisation details  
via the contact manager?

2)This format allows this 'referrals' section to also carry out the function 
of writing reports, legal letters etc for the patient.

3)Referrals_savedletters.png shows the result once the letter is saved. My 
code created a rich text file and saved it with the specialists 
name/organisation name and date. As I constructed the rtf files myself I 
stripped most of the junk out of the rtf header so that only a font such as 
timesnew roman was encoded. An entire 1page printed letter occupies about 
1-2k and the maximum letter size I've ever had is 3k. Very small overhead. 
Clicking on one of the names in the list re-displays the letter in the left 
hand side of the screen in it's entireity, where it can be re-read, or 
re-printed, or edited and resaved under a different file name.

4)Where the letter is short, as in the example shown here (referrals.png), the 
area under the editing area suffices. Where a longer letter, or where one 
wants to edit the pre-formatted clinical data e.g delete a non relevant part 
of say family history or past history, then clicking preview shows the letter 
full page and one can type/edit at will.

5)Default behaviours need to be configured eg always set the firstname 
checkbox if you want the letters to automatically say 'Dear fred, instead of 
Dear Doctor Whatsyourname. Similarly if a config file contains an 'include 
all clinical information' then all 6 checkboxes pertinant to the patients 
history are checked upon selecting the referrals page.

6). The Save and print icons on the patients tool bar will always be context 
sensitive. ie when in the referrals section and one clicks print, it just 
prints the letter, not any other outstanding say scripts, requests etc. 

7). In this electronic age one also needs the facility to email the letter via 
say a context sensitve email button on the top bar (which I'll have to stick 
on) - hey - we could have a built in email client - I know there is a project 
going to have one in wxPython!!) on another tab

I've left off the 'Department/branch label. If we are going to allow on screen 
editing this will need to be included.

The copy to line I didn't include in my original, however often one gets 
letters from specialists which have a cc to one or more people so I think 
this needs to go in.  The date text box is there because sometimes one has to 
backdate a referral because the patient forgot to get one prior to the 
consultation. It's not strictly necessary and if screen real estate is at a 
premium it can be omitted and the user just change the date which is auto 
inserted in the letter at the time of its generation.

The gui is a little rough, I'll adjust the proportions of the prompts to make 
them match the text boxes, and also the width of the right hand boxes to 
allow more room for say email address.

Ok, comments please. I'll post the code later tonight to the CVS.

referrals_savedletters.png
Description: PNG image

referrals.png
Description: PNG image