Re: [Gnumed-devel] Measurements (was: New developer searching for a task)

[Horst Herb]

On Thu, 5 Dec 2002 23:39, Christof Meigen wrote:
> 2) Normalization: Either you stick a measurement to a clinical
>    transaction, which might be not appropriate if people get
>    measured elsewhere or do (like diabetis patients?, or
>    people with high blood pressure?) measure themselves and
>    tell you, like (I' thinking up something, I'm not a doctor)
>    "Two days ago I had 180/130, yesterday I had 210/150,
>    so I thought I better come here" or whatever ... "I was on
>    a health resort and the doctor there measured this and that..."
>    
>    It seems to be against the intention of clinical_transaction
>    (with it's involved doctor_ID) to let these things be
>    "clinical transactions".

I am working on a solution for this - one of the reasons why I haven't 
submitted the clinical tables script yet.
For now, measurements are certainly stored in a separate table. For 
performance reasons, the units are not normalized. A pivot table allows to 
link measurements to clinical transactions and/or diseases/clinical problems; 
these links are not mandatory, thus you can have measurements identified only 
by the date.
Furthermore I am working on a "fuzzy date" data type allowing things like "2 
weeks ago" to be enetered in a congruent and sortable way without creatig 
artificial pseudo-precision.

Horst