[Gnumed-devel] gmDrugs

[Hilmar Berger]

Hi,

I just had a look at the new gmDrugs table design. It's really well done,
and it seems to me that it will be much easier to port AMIS data to
gmDrugs now. Thanks, Horst! 
However, I would like to make some remarks: 

1. I would suggest to separate information on subsidies, regulations and
restrictions on products from general applicable data like substances,
indications and so on. IMHO the former is to specific and to complex and
should be kept in tables marked by a country identifier to apply only to a
certain national pharmaceutical system. For instance in Germany (Karsten,
please correct me if I'm wrong), drug prescription and pricing is
regulated by social legislation, medical authorities/bodies and health
insurances quite detailed and subsidies are rather the rule and not the
exception. AMIS contains data on what resctrictions are imposed on
prescription and sale of a certain product/drug. These resctrictions apply
to all so-called 'statutory' insurance organizations in the same way (in
opposition to so-called 'private' insurance companies, that usually don't
impose restrictions, no subsidies are paid and the insurance company
returns the price paid to the patient). I believe that translating these
restrictions to a generalizable table structure of subsidies is not
feasible.  I would like to rename table 'subsidized_products' to
'product_regulations_<COUNTRY_IDENTIFIER>' and move all country-specific
product information to this table.

2. adverse_effects.severity , interactions.severity: I would suggest
staying with the scale that comes with the national database (MIMS, AMIS)
as it might be difficult to translate one scale to another one (at least
translating ordinal scales is IMHO not that easy).

3. generic_drug: What are indication, practice-points and consideration
for ? Indication should be already covered by link_drug_indication,
shouldn't it?

Hilmar