Re: [Gnumed-devel] Common Forms

[Karsten Hilbert]

Richard,

there's several things we need to keep in mind:

1) There's fill-in-the-blank forms vs. plain-paper forms.
2) There's forms on-screen (data entry masks) and forms on
   paper (both templates and filled-in ones). On-screen I
   would definitely opt for your generic data entry area !
   This doesn't have much to do with what happens on paper,
   though.

Most of the forms here in Germany are fill-in-the-blank in
various sizes ranging from A6 to A4. We _are_ progressing to
blank paper forms albeit very slowly.

I would also keep patient handouts separate from actual forms.
It should be a checkbox on the form whether to print out the
printout :-)

> I instututed such a form generator in my program several years ago. The forms 
> themselves never of course need to be kept, simply pointers to the type of 
> provider, type of request, patient_Id, request etc.
Yes and no. Narrative in forms _should_ be kept in separate
tables, IMHO, as it can change ! Consider, e.g. a provider
that goes out of business. Unless, of course, we achieve the
lofty goal of never deleting anything from a GnuMed system
(but do we want to keep around obsolete drugs forever ? No, we
want to store transmitted medication info _in_ the form
instance, not just a pointer to the drug which _will_ become
invalid sometime in the future.) Or consider the case where I
will amend the terse clinical diagnosis with two or three
words to make it more palatable/useful to the target doctor. I
won't want to store that extra info with the diagnosis in the
EMR since the diagnosis may have to be in a certain form for
automatic coding.

Your edit area is not forgotten :-)

Karsten
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