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

[richard terry]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 08:17 pm, Ian Haywood wrote:
> 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?

Depends what you mean  by encoded. You backend people would have more idea 
than I. IN VB  however, in my ignorance I just had a table I called 
data_scratchpad with a counter id, consult_id,(key to main id table 
containing consult_id, patient_id, type, date etc.) deleted as boolean. When 
the item was dealt with it was either flagged complete, complete with text 
explanation, and any text was auto-recorded in the progress notes for that 
day.
>
> 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 ;-)]. 

Not that hard. Firstly dumb learning symptoms are very efficicient as you 
imply below, plus, don't forget that even a basic coding system such as ICPC 
has linked terms of synonyms (so that when you type say 'ot' in the next term 
under it on the list might be 'middle ear infection' etc) which make building 
dumb learning systems pretty quick and easy.
Secondly don't forget that there are only a limited number of common 
conditions we all see. One has to start somewhere. Malcolm Ireland and I are 
particularly interested in this sort of stuff, so when we get up to it I'm 
sure we will both contribute.


Richard

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.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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