Re: [Gnumed-devel] Better-supporting staff and other non-patient persons

[Jim Busser]

On 12-Jun-09, at 1:57 PM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> There will be tables defining persons as other types of
> people.

Maybe you did not mean other types, maybe you only meant

> There will be tables defining persons as various (one or more)  
> types of people.

We do already have a staff table. We do already have a dem.occupation  
table and maybe here could be stored a person's occupation as doctor  
and type of doctor (GP vs cardiologist vs respirologist) since if we  
slit out a separate table for doctors do we then need separate tables  
to identify which individuals are physiotherapists, which are nurses  
etc?

What would define a person as having been a patient? Would it be  
achieved
- by inference, meaning that after (and only after) associated  
clinical records can be shown to exist, this must have been a  
patient, at some point in time?
- or would it be achieved by an explicit decision on the part of the  
user, for example a secretary or doctor creates the person and  
declares "this person is now defined as a patient, so that even if we  
did not yet create associated clinical entries, it is only because it  
is a new referral and we did not yet see the patient, they have an  
appointment to come and see us in 2 weeks.

There is value to be able to know, in a large database of persons,  
which of them has been a patient, in order to assist appropriate  
record selection during (for example) data exports desired to consist  
purely of patient-type persons and similarly, when doing statistics,  
if you had 5,000 patients and 300 non-patients and wanted to know  
what percent were diabetics, you want this calculated with a  
denominator of 5,000 patients not 5,300 people.

Therefore I do not know whether to prompt the user to explicitly  
update a value that we might keep in the table dem.identity  
(is_patient), or whether this value would get updated automatically  
after the user had created data inside any of the plug-ins.


> > What if I wish to locate a set of cardiologists among whom I might  
> > make a
> > referral?
> We currently do not support that.
>
> > > > The clinical plug-ins (EMR tree, Progress notes, EMR journal,
> > > > Documents, Attach documents, and Measurements)
> > > > should refuse to be switched-to the way they presently
> > > > refuse when "no patient is selected".  In other words, they
> > > > should require more than having a *person* in focus, they
> > > > should require to have *a person who is_a_patient* in focus.
> > > Can you register this part as a wishlist bug on launchpad ?
> >
> > Maybe first needs discussion?
>
> ... It seems a mighty good idea to me although preferable
> implementation details still elude me.