Re: [Gnumed-devel] Enhancement proposal: Medication cloning

[Busser, James]

Presently, I am thinking that clin.substance_intake may accept to store no more 
than

        the unique {substance, amount} that this patient ever had, until deleted


whereas what I am proposing is that it would be better if it could allow and 
enable to preserve, and to enable a review that includes the inactive 
medications and where the rows would provide, for the current patient, the 

         {substance, dates, amount, schedule}

        order by
                pk_item (or alpha name resolved for pk_item),
                clin_when

and the constraint should be that for any

        {patient, substance, amount} 

to avoid two or more different schedules for the same product wherein the data 
range {clin_when, discontinued} overlapped by more than just the bounding dates 
(which is when one schedule might end as the next one starts).

This would give the freedom to be able to

1) enter a substance to be started (e.g.) *now*, on an initial schedule for a 
certain number of days, followed by
2) pre-entering the same substance to have a different schedule, beginning at a 
different (future) start date

This would be a huge advantage over the way any other EMR that I know of 
currently displays medications, as either

- prescriptions, where the breakpoints communicate administrative (rather than 
clinical) information, or
- as a very limited list, from which the changes cannot be determined and 
requiring to go back into the notes to reconstruct what has been going on with 
the medications

-- Jim