[Gnumed-devel] Re: What is SOAP - Why edit area suited to this

[Ian Haywood]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 09:25:46 +1000
richard terry <address@hidden> wrote:

> Ian, I'd have to really disagree with you on the confusion of the scratch pad 
> and the soap stuff. 
> 
> Totally different.
> 
> The scratch pad is an invaluable clinician oriented memory jogger where one 
> puts stuff which may or may not be relevant to the clinical care of the 
> patient.

Point taken. Two questions:

1/ when the consult ends and there's stuff in the scratchpad, how is it encoded
in the clinical record?

2/ how should the SOAP form fit into the current design?

> likely possibilities of symptoms based on the childs age, the preceeding 
> symptom etc and this is presented in the phrase wheel.

This implies serious expert system activity behind the scenes, sounds hard to 
implement.
[of course, I'm happy to be proven wrong ;-)]. However,  we
could have a dumb 'learning' system: it offers the sign "bulging eardrum" on 
the phrasewheel because that's
what you entered last time the symptom "earache" was entered, it doesn't need 
to have a heuristic
explaining the connection between the two.