Re: [Gnumed-devel] clinician input wanted: how to implement "coding"

[Jim Busser]

On 2009-12-03, at 2:17 PM, richard terry wrote:

> I think coding is very useful and should be enforced in many situations such 
> as with health issues, otherwise you've no means to trawl your database for 
> information for example pulling out all diabetes with a certain disease, as 
> there are multiple different language terms for the diagnosis. Enforcing its 
> use is not an encumberance on the user if it is done sensibly.
> 
> The advantage of displaying a code is to inform the user that in fact 
> something is coded - so for those doctors to whom coding/research is 
> important, they know they have entered a coded term even if they don't need 
> to 
> know what it is.

I do rather agree.

A sensible enforcement configuration should be per praxis, and not per user, 
because if a praxis comes to some agreement that it needs enforcement  in an 
area (say, coding of health issues) then the members of the praxis will want 
their EMR to help assure that no one (or multiple) members get lazy and do not 
bother.

Absent enforcement, it would still be useful to visually identify (as a 
minimum) the distinction between items that do have at least one code, and 
items which have none. I don't think the code itself has to be shown in the 
normal view, just the barest indication, whether it be a bullet or some other 
visual cue.

For any list of items that might be codable, for example heath issues, I am 
expecting that any one praxis will commonly use one to three systems. One is 
likely to be used as their main system and the others maybe less often. I am 
imagining some kind of row / column layout, with the one most frequently used 
by the praxis position first. This could be a different tool from the grid that 
is used for test result viewing in order to make things like phrasewheel fields 
accessible.