Re: [Gnumed-devel] How should / shall an EMR handle group visits?

[Sebastian Hilbert]

On Wednesday 05 October 2011 07:01:35 Jim Busser wrote:
> On 2011-10-04, at 8:09 PM, Rogerio Luz Coelho wrote:
> > PS: This is not a "we need this feature" or anything like that, its just
> > a comment on how the system works
> 
> Sebastian made a comment about postponing to allocate resources to such
> things until someone really needs it.
> 
> I do not myself need it any time soon, however a colleague who understands
> what is poor in the design of many EMRs (including those which he has
> used) has said he is postponing to change to any new EMR until he is more
> satisfied with their designs, and he wants any EMR that he would use to
> support:
> 
> - SNOMED-CT (or other clinically suitable) terminology, supplemented by
> free text in cases where the SNOMED-CT term was inaddequate - clinical
> trainees (students, interns, residents) involved in patient care - group
> visits
> - clinical decision support
> 
It certainly is possible to support e.g. group visits. No doubt about that. It 
just needs work.

However.

I my opinion waiting for the above does not make sense.

What I mean is those features are surely desired, even important maybe but in 
many cases this is just an excerpt. When those features are done others might 
come up. There is always this one killer feature.

Why not choose an EMR where the above can be easily added while the old EMR is 
just used because there is no better one ?


> So mainly I was wanting to understand if we could envision (picture) a
> suitable solution or approach to group visits -- even if the approach
> would not be immediately coded, and/or even if the coding would need to
> wait for whoever has the itch severe enough to scratch
> 

Sure. As Rogerio pointed out one might just code up a new plugin for group 
visits. In this plugin you would have a SOAP area and a listcontrol. In the 
listcontrol one could add patients present. This would be a matter of bringing 
up a search widget and returning a handle to the patient record to the list 
control. Upon saving the soap note would be written to the all the records. 

One might come up with the question on what to do if something was mistakenly 
recorded. Well this would have to be corrected in the individual records. If 
you want to edit the same entries in a number of records in a single place 
that would add massive complexity. So unless you really need this and have 20 
patients per group visit and have to edit records every day I would think 
twice about adding that complexity

Sebastian