[Gnumed-devel] Lab data support in Gnumed

[Jim Busser]

Is all of the following functionality (initially or eventually) 
essential for the lab (or "test" or "investigations") results area?

- results matching and linking to individual patients *provided* the ID 
tags fully satisfy pre-defined criteria, otherwise:

- soft matches are offered, each subject to user approval before 
linking (undo ability would be nice)

- unmatched data deserves careful thought. On the one hand it may have 
been routed incorrectly to a physician who has no interest in it, for 
exampe if the requesting physician had intended a copy to go to Dr 
Busser but in their pick-list selected Dr Buster. OTOH it may represent 
a patient who does not yet exist in Gnumed, yet can still be pertinent 
to the practice (patient may have been referred in say by a Clinic or 
Emergency doctor without having yet been registered in the practice, or 
the patient could have been seen by one of the group's Doctor's OUTSIDE 
of Gnumed eg at a hospital, and may be seen at the office for the first 
time in followup. Here it would be convenient if the software could 
permit a new patient to be created from the lab data reconciliation 
screen helpfully taking advantage of any useful info that may already 
present in the lab data file (name, demographics, health insurance 
number - I guess the content could vary with the supplier and the HL7 
or other standard implementation)

- manual entry of test result data e.g. historical or otherwise 
non-interfaced electronically, where it is of sufficient value/interest 
to the doctor to input


(On the subject, we had also previously established we wanted:

- batch download and processing of resulted tests (automated via 
schedule) would be a given basic minimum for an EMR

- user-triggerable downloads and processing, for example where the 
Gnumed (or source lab) server had been down and come back up and where 
a scheduled pickup would have been missed. Alternatively where a 
patient is sitting with you in the office and it is suspected that a 
patient's important results could have come available since the last 
scheduled batch job - here it would make the doctor's job easier than 
to have to phone the lab, wait on hold, and then handle results by 
phone/fax until they can be later imported