Inbox improvement (was Re: [Gnumed-devel] Notes on patient episode)

[Jim Busser]

On 1-Jul-09, at 3:29 AM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

Maybe even this could be the means to get to a "post-it" widget for "your

eyes (and inbox) only" on every patient ... who knows ...

That's on the TODO: a patient-specific, provider-independent

inbox. Not a big deal but requires getting coded :-)

I am still making a clearer picture of best-use between the inbox and waitlist.

I am thinking of the inbox more for items that require attention by individual clinicians, however it is possible that medical office assistants (can I use the abbreviation MOAs?) might also have items needing individual attention.

As far as communication, are we thinking that communication that pertains to individual patients would be communicated within GNUmed but that communication that is not relatable (and storable) to individual patients would be communicated outside of gnumed.

The waitlist I tend to think of as a list to be attended to by the MOAs with the advantage that "zones" can be used to represent roles and whichever (more than one or alternating) MOAs who would share in that role can take care of that part of the waitlist. Of course, there is no reason that a clinician could not place, in the waitlist, things that they must, themselves, take care of.

Coming back to the possibility of a provider-independent inbox... I was wondering about the possibility of a "role" here. Certainly among a group of general internists (who may provide comprehensive care by way of overlap with the GP care for complex patients) there is a function they share when new referrals come in and some prioritization among these referrals needs to be done. Presently, if an import assistant would attach documents to a patient, the document must be assigned to an individual intended reviewer. I am wondering if it could be assignable to "null". The inbox would need an adjustment, to enable a filter on "unowned" items. "Unowned" could help the situation when there exists a new patient who will be coming to the praxis but it may not be determined until the actual visit which doctor will "attend" them. It also helps the situation when new documents would be added while a doctor is away... the import assistants could assign these to reviewer "null" (shall we make this an acceptable default?) and that way any of the other doctors could look at it and if they were satisfied it can wait for the return of the colleague simply assign it to that colleague.

We would still need some way, when a doctor is absent (on vacation), for new auto-assigned items that would go into their inbox to be able to be reviewed by another doctor. So maybe, instead of a filter on "none", the filter could be on "any clinician, including null" and whichever was selected would enable a different doctor to visually scan the colleague inbox. I suppose here there would be a value of splitting those results into those which had not been viewed or signed by anybody versus those which, already having been viewed / signed, did not have to be looked at again.