Re: [Gnumed-devel] Lab data support in Gnumed

[Karsten Hilbert]

> Is all of the following functionality (initially or eventually) 
> essential for the lab (or "test" or "investigations") results area?
I faint at the mere thought of answering the depths of your
questions :-)

> - results matching and linking to individual patients *provided* the ID 
> tags fully satisfy pre-defined criteria, otherwise:
Results matching and linking is (in the German model) done
during the import step. Unmatchable results aren't imported
but rather reported (via housekeeping_todo where category=lab
-> Lab journal plugin -> Tab "lab errors").

> - soft matches are offered, each subject to user approval before 
> linking (undo ability would be nice)
An explicit association must be established before the next
import attempt.

> - 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.
In that case, often an entire batch of results will be
misappropriated (in the German model, anyways). If just one
result (out of a batch) is misplaced it will show up as an
"missing association" import error at first and will reveal
it's misrouting because no match "lab request ID" <-> "result ID"
can be found. Or, if the patient is unknown, or if the patient
isn't expected to receive results. In the first case, the
error may be ignored and a request be given to the admin to
remove the offending record from the import queue. In the
latter cases the patient may either be created or a request
for the patient be created.

> 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 
Yes. Eventually :-)

> - 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
Possible via edit area.

> - batch download and processing of resulted tests (automated via 
> schedule) would be a given basic minimum for an EMR
This is what we are doing right now. Almost ready to go live
here.

> - user-triggerable downloads and processing, for example where the 
Same here.

Karsten
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