Re: [Gnumed-devel] re timezones

[Karsten Hilbert]

> By timestamp I assume we refer to capture and writing of the server 
> date and time, per its "system clock" (or else the date & time of the 
> client machine).
True, true, I admit to decrepitude already :-)

> If so, then through timestamp
> 
> - PG will capture the date & time of any RECORD's creation (or 
> modification)
Yep.

> - such a timestamp will only accurately depict a clinical event when 
> the client was in use during the event
Yep.

> - dates & times of clinical events will otherwise be captured as either:
> --- free text (in which the event location ought to be captured hence 
> addressing the ambiguity) or as
Yep, as per Liz' example of the ancle injury.

> --- a user-coded date & time
Yep, as, say, in a vaccination.

> Suppose in the latter case an Australian patient holidays to Honolulu 
> and, on their last day (with insurance expiring), receives care 
> recorded in Gnumed as having been given April 9 at 4pm (though this 
> would be 12:30pm April 10 on Lord Howe Island, Australia). Six hours 
> later, the patient boards a 12-hour  "red eye" flight to Australia, and 
> arrives at what is now 6:30 am on April 11 in Australia and a few hours 
> later sees his GP who, for the sake of argument, can access the 
> Honolulu Gnumed record. The GP will either see that the care, viewed 
> relative to the point of delivery, had been given April 9 ("looks like 
> 2 days ago") or else April 10 ("looks like yesterday"). If a resolution 
> of this were important, I might like to view it from the context in 
> which it was delivered i.e. to be told/shown the date/time according to 
> the time zone in which the event occurred, but also to have it 
> expressed as # days / hours ago.
This is a much better description of the problem I was worried
about. At some point we'll have to invent some mechanism to
make it possible to display the timezone (mouseover/tooltip or
something).

BTW, we already capture clinical and event time |-)

clin_root_item.clin_when
audit_fields.modified_when

...

Karsten
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