Re: [Gnumed-devel] First sample of gui function docs

[Tim Churches]

On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 21:35, richard terry wrote:
> Attatched is a (apologies) .doc file
> 
> This is sample docs for the demographic summary section, the simplest gui of 
> the whole program. It contains a screen dump.

> This whole thing is going to take many many hours so if feed back is ok, I'll 
> try and average one section a night, so should get a fair bit done in a few 
> weeks.

Sorry for taking so long to comment. The document is generally OK, some
detailed comments (in no particular order) follow - many of these
comments refer to what "demographic" data should be collected:

a) Age should be in expressed in days up to one month, in months and
days up to perhaps 4 or 6 months, years and months up to perhaps 5
years, and in completed years after that (not rounded to integer years).
b) Address history? People move, some quite a lot, and generally the
lower the socio-economic status of the person, the more they move. Does
the demographic back-end capture address history (if not it should). If
so, then at least the previous address (if recorded) should be shown,
and the (approximate) date of last move.

c) Occupational history? Patient might be a bus driver now but was a
boilermaker in the past - which may be more relevant to his current
dyspnoea. 

d) Highest educational level. Increasing evidence that on a population
level this is even more strongly associated with health outcomes than
income. Of course, not necessarily true for any individual, but a useful
indicator.

e) Ethnicity! Country of birth, first language, language spoken at home,
English (or local dominant language) proficiency - perhaps just as a
flag ". Essential.

f) Relations: family member details.

Allergies are not demographic or social details like the rest of the
information, but I agree that they are useful to display here. But what
else? Seems like there is potentially quite a lot of screen real estate,
might as well use it for other persistent (but not immutable)
characteristics of the patient: perhaps chronic problems list, with
details of who else is involved in the shared care?

OK, now all the the above is overkill for version 1.0, but could be put
on teh to-do list. However, some of them are essential for Version 1.0,
I think, especially e).

One general question: I don't understand how this panel fits in overall
- is it used to quickly retrieve details of any patient, not just the
"current" patient? Or just a summary for the current patient? If the
latter, then perhaps rename it from 'Demographic summary" to 'patient
summary", and expand it to include items noted above (and others) - but
with the demographics at the top.
-- 

Tim C

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