Re: [Gnumed-devel] demographics.sql

[Jim Busser]

On Mar 15, 2004, at 10:23 AM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> Certainly, I propose to base this on:
> - full name at birth
> - date of birth in Gregorian Calendar
> - country of birth at time of birth
> - mothers name at birth
> - ethnicity
> - arbitrary field
> ...
> And then we need to turn this mess into a string.
> Perhaps we can just use a text field and separate fields by
> newlines with a given mandatory order of fields leaving blank

Some systems formalize this by defining a combination such as 2 of 3, 3 of 5, or 4 of 6 and might weight them differently, the alternative would be to let the user decide themselves based on visual inspection. Non-medical office staff would surely want the comfort of a uniform standard within a medical practice, so as to worry less about being raked over the coals in the event of an error.

City of birth would be better than country of birth, at least for native-born persons - gnumed could easily be programmed to "reject" the input of one's own country into the field. The disadvantages of city of birth include not born in a city (some larger rural place name) and the problems inherent in the office staff trying to spell and input the names of foreign cities especially smaller ones. Might however be a good compromise - foreign country or (for native born) the national city name.

As far as capturing over at the wiki I can do this, I wondered if it should link to the roadmap item  patient input/search/modification in which it is stated that the" input needs considerably more smarts"