Re: [Gnumed-devel] Patient whose name (in the public db) is in a different alphabet... Greek to me?

[Jim Busser]

On 7-Jul-09, at 7:28 AM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> > There is a patient who has (or who at least this morning had) inbox
> > results by name of
> >
> >         Περαντώνη, Ms Ελένη (x)
> >
> > just wondering... how manageable for the praxis assistants to search
> > for such a name i.e. how to input from the keyboard, even if the
> > staff would be familiar with the language?
> >
> > I am wondering if such patients would often use a common-name (alias)
> > in the local language
>
> That is a perfectly valid Greek name. Greek keyboards can perfectly  
> well
> enter those characters. For people not having a Greek keyboard but
> needing to search for the patient I would recommend googling a greek
> text and having the patient cut-n-paste the appropriate letters into
> the search box. GNUmed can (should be able) perfectly fine search
> for greek names.

You are kidding, right? If this patient -- say, as a visitor -- did  
appear for care with her name provided only in Greek characters, I  
cannot imagine the office assistants doing gymnastics to try to match  
the characters, neither later when having to handle a question about  
this person to match the sound of the name to a non-Latin character.  
I suppose the patient could be found in GNUmed using date of birth  
but I expect a better solution for the praxis would be to input a  
suitable alias.

e.g. I did use Google translate on the characters that I pasted from  
the name, and I got
        Perantoni, Ms Helen (x) 

There is a keyboard layout at wikipedia if that would help anyone  
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout) whereas handily on the  
Mac some applications including the Mail application give direct  
access to the Mac character palette, of which I attach a screenshot  
with "Greek and Copric" selected:

Mac Character palette.png
Description: application/applefile