Re: [Gnumed-devel] Request For Comment

[Karsten Hilbert]

On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 03:28:39PM -0700, Jim Busser wrote:

> A patient yesterday had no concept of decimals when I tried to explain 
> the prescription helpfully pre-formatted by the hospital system at 
> discharge.
Ah, the wonders of Real Life(tm) !

> Mine may not be the only patient who had trouble understanding that
>
>       0.5 tab means half
>       2.5 tab does not mean 25 tabs

Surely not !

> It is realistic to support a mapped substitution system so that
>
>       0.5 can be instead instructed as "one half"
>       0.25 as "one quarter"

Is it realistic to assume that someone who has trouble
knowing "0.5" to mean "one half" will be OK with "1/2" (in
proper superscript / subscript format) to mean "one half" ?

> I wonder whether it would be in the step of selecting a printout  
> "format" that the clinician would decide what a particular patient  
> needs?
It would, yes. I don't think it is unrealistic either.
Fairly easy to implement, too. Feel free to put it on the
Wiki page. One might event decide to put both of 0.5 (or
1/2) *and* "one half", say in parenthesis, onto the
printout.

Karsten
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