Re: [Gnumed-devel] Demographic address labelling "Place"

[Jim Busser]

On 2011-09-18, at 3:20 AM, Liz wrote:

> Where'd ya live?
> 
> What's yer address?

: - )

I asked my wife "if you went to the Doctor's office and they asked you 'what 
place are you from'" her answer was uncertainty, as to the question:

        do you mean 'where was I born'
        or do you mean 'what place did I just come from'
        ?

I agree that in the course of requesting a patient's address, most of the 
information is likely to spew out in one form or another.

When asked the question 'what's your address', Canadians would answer with

        number street [pause]

        if applicable: apartment / unit number [pause]

and what happens next depends on the context:

- if people working at the praxis front desk are likely to recognize the street 
as local, these front desk staff may automatically say the city / town / 
village name, or it may go unsaid, or the patient may say it out loud anyway 
just through force of habit. Force of habit dispenses with any uncertainly over 
whether so and so street might exist in multiple cities, or if it would be 
unrecognized by front desk staff e.g. persons new to the area.

- the state or province are typically skipped when they should be obvious, 
after which is stated a postal or zip.

GNUmed can turn this upside down, by asking the patient for their postal. I 
have become more accustomed to this, as a result of retail stores who do not 
care to record the customer's specific address but who desire the postal to 
have some ideas where their customers reside. Perhaps some software systems 
also leverage the postal in the way Karsten implemented for GNUmed.

******************************************************
But we are still left with the question of the *label*.
******************************************************

If I would see (entered next to this label) a value I did not recognize, I 
would be curious about the size of this place. My province of British Columbia 
has a dozen city-equivalents above 90,000 in size, and I know little about the 
many others except maybe location, unless I visited them. We also claim the 
smallest city in Canada (Greenwood, population 625).

The population aspect evokes the name of the person's "settlement" and makes 
the argument to input a key pair

        settlement name / settlement type {hamlet, village, parish, town, city}

because such a pair could tell us a lot about the level of health services 
likely to be available.

But if we abandon the above as too tenuous, we come back to "where is this 
Street?".

More specifically, what is the geo-context for where the point on the street is 
centred or located? Ideally we might like a geolocation because that will 
actually tell us (better than a city name) exactly where and how distant is 
that point. This can be very helpful!

---> is this an argument to future-support a geo-location ?

In the meantime, we still need the village / town / city name for 'routing' for 
mail or other transportation. So --- maybe better than the Locality or Locale 
offered by Liz and son (because I agree its menaing won't be sufficiently 
clear) --- I am now thinking either

        Street location
or      Centre

and BTW maybe the german Bundesland should be made Region because not all 
german-prevalent countries have bundeslands !  ;-)

-- Jim