Re: [Gnumed-devel] Request For Comment

[Jim Busser]

On 4-Mar-09, at 9:58 AM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> There will be two printout formats:
>
>         - times per drug
>         - drugs-per-time

What would determine the sort order among drugs, within the "time per  
drug" report?

Possibly there is value to oldest entry at the top and newer at the  
bottom, but that might not be meaningful. Another might be alpha,  
which might be useful when trying to locate a particular drug inside  
a very long list, but otherwise this adds little value.

I was wondering whether at some stage the drugs might carry a link to  
the condition for which a patient is using them, for example a  
problem on the problem list or, when the drug had not been  
"attached", the association would be "Misc" or "Unattributed"

The value would be that the condition could then serve a grouping  
function. It is sometimes helpful when reviewing drugs to see them  
"in context" both to identify redundancy and to identify whether all  
useful options are already explored. The same is true when working on- 
screen when we might expand the query to include previous drugs, so  
that when examining any problem we might easily in this way view what  
had already been tried (instead of having to humanly parse the many  
"Plan" rows across very many encounters.

Optionally the patient could have the name of the associated problem  
showing on their printout, to educate and remind them why they are  
taking the drug. But even if they did not want the reason to appear,  
it remains helpful to the clinician to see them listed together.