Re: [Gnumed-devel] Confusing dialog "Deleting medication"

[Jim Busser]

On 2010-11-21, at 12:59 PM, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

>>> 2) the button "Delete" that already exists on the main Medications
>> plugin
>>> can bring forward the Editing window in the same manner as in #1 or
>> could
>>> be removed
>> 
>> You would like two buttons with different names to bring up the
>> same dialog ?
>> 
>> Or else you would like people to press "Edit" when
>> they want to "Delete" ? That's like pressing "Start" when
>> you want to "End".
> 
> I think I must be misunderstanding something here.
> 
> Karsten

We need careful thinking in order for GNUmed to improve on being just a 
snapshot of current medication with no history. Even ignoring "writing a 
prescription" there is important information that will get lost. When I say 
lost I do not mean permanently lost, because the clinical audit tables will 
hold copied of deprecated records. I am talking about functional clinical 
unavailability.

I cannot recall any direct responses to my question of how we want to 
understand discontinuing a medication versus deleting.

At least, in the EMR tree, we only allow deletion of Health Issues but we do 
not allow deletion of any subjacent clinical notes and in fact require these to 
be put under some other issue before the offending issue is allowed to be 
deleted.

In medications, however we seem to allow deletion (meaning removal of the 
clinical record) even though the records contain maybe clinically needed 
detail. This is why:

1) I want us to consider "Deleting" a medication as a non-frequent, nearly 
admin-level (super user) correction of something that was only ever incorrectly 
placed on a patient's record. I am not saying to require admin or db ownership, 
a clinician can understand they make such an error and (provided they are 
certain no action was taken on it) maybe it is acceptable to make it "go away" 
with a reason embedded. It still feels risky. I really don't want it seen as 
any kind of normal action to be accessed from among the main buttons of the 
Medication plug-in which is why i am now asking it be removed (takes care of 
your concern "2 different ways") and make it nested more deeply inside the Edit 
window.

2) there are precedents to bury deletion as a special case inside Editing. If 
you believe "Edit" should have the narrow meaning of "edit in place" then make 
it another word like Alter or Change

3) if you do not want Delete inside Edit (or whatever it would be called) then 
do not send the user sideways to the Edit window to input a reason and instead 
offer inside the Deletion window a field in which to enter the Reason which 
IMHO should only ever be
- wrong patient (but no harm done)
- wrong entry (but no harm done)