[Gnumed-devel] GnuMed/Archive // patient object

[Karsten Hilbert]

Dear all,

GnuMed/Archive is the medical document archival part of
GnuMed. Its code lives in test-area/blobs_hilbert/. The system
supports scanning of documents and importing from files,
indexing (associating files with metadata), importing and
accessing those documents. It has been in production use for a
few weeks now in a medical office here in Germany although
there still are some problems to iron out (Windows TCP sockets
don't support large file transfers ...).

I am currently talking to Alex Caldwell and we are
trying to connect GnuMed/Archive to Tk Family Practice.

The codebase is quite stable and robust. It can be run
standalone although GUI/architecture-wise everything is ready
to be integrated as a GnuMed plugin. In fact, with some manual
tweaking all parts already run as plugins.

Our main show-stopper currently is that GnuMed proper is still
missing a patient object with associated API. I am urgently
asking Horst to check in what he is working on (test-area) and
mark obsolete (not delete) older attempts at such an object. As
long as I have a decent API for now I don't care whether a) the
API will change sligtly later on (sure, a bit of typing but
what the heck) or b) whatever happens underneath that API.

I would propose two main ways for accessing backend data via
the patient object:

a) via dedicated methods wrapping particular data, eg DOB
   - this only makes sense for a relatively small range of
     well-known attributes
   - those should be cached in the patient
   - cPatient.getDOB(self, aFormat=None)

b) via a lower level API (in the patient object !) for directly
   sending queries (inherited, of course)
   - assisted by the business knowledge of the patient
     object

Whatever it is, we need it now.

Regards,
Karsten
-- 
GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net
E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD  4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346