Re: [Gnumed-devel] clin_health_issue - some thoughts

[J Busser]

At 2:53 PM +0100 11/28/04, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> Imagine a post-polytraumatic patient. I would define a health
> issue "post-polytrauma 1987". The patient might suffer
> temporally unrelated (eg. overlapping and/or distinct)
> episodes of osteomyelitis, back pain, spells of dizziness. All
> of which would be episodes to the polytrauma issue

But if over time there is
- more than one episode of back pain
- more than one episode of spells of dizziness etc

... it would be entirely reasonable to want to be able to aggregate 
them but there is no mechanism by which to do so, you would have to 
pick them out visually and this gets even harder if each episode 
takes on the name of a changeable AOE. And what happens if the 
health_issue is sufficiently broad that its various episodes do not 
all fit within a single GUI screen?

I am a bit stymied because I cannot tell whether no-one on the list 
thinks it useful to be able to aggregate (to see grouped together in 
a GUI widget) any relationship among episodes, or whether there is 
subconscious agreement and only a nagging feeling of how to do this 
without complicating the data structure.

If we stay to Karsten's proposal that a health_issue is a "cause" and 
an episode is a cluster of "problem activity" -- but various episodes 
can either be different problems, or "newly opened" incarnations of a 
previous problem, then we need to keep the names of the "newly 
opened" episodes the same as the names of the older ones - maybe in 
the widgets some kind of batch naming function, the "problem" can 
have all of its episodes named identically based on some user-defined 
name maybe updated via AOE (however we would then lose the ability of 
the AOE to speak specifically to the episode in question ).