Re: [Gnumed-devel] GUI active encounter panel

[Busser, Jim]

On 2015-01-28, at 8:22 AM, Jim Busser <address@hidden> wrote:

> The active encounter panel includes two buttons,
> 
>       N - create new encounter
> 
>       L - list encounters

Even better -- unless not possible, or too difficult -- would be for the part 
of the panel that describes the current encounter to also *be* a button which 
either

        opens into "edit encounter details"

or

        opens the list of encounters (thus absorbing the "L" function)

with my preference being the former.

If it is chosen to make it open to the list of encounters, we could make this 
panel aesthetically cleaner by removing the N button and allowing New to be 
achieved by a button press from inside the encounter list. But if it is felt 
too desirable to keep the "N" available from the main GNUmed GUI, I would still 
slide the "N" to the left edge of the panel, because a click thereon would 
initiate the "New" encounter which would then show to the right of the "N".

A couple of additional thoughts about the "N" ...

First, it results in a dialog that the user must then acknowledge and dismiss. 
However, since there is no "undo", the only purpose of this dialog is to let 
the user know that the click was "effective". But this could be silently 
observed simply by seeing the new time stamp, and also by the status line at 
bottom left which will have refreshed to say

        "Started a new encounter for the active patient."

Second, it requires many steps to change the type of the newly-created 
encounter. There are good reasons beyond just the passage of time to create a 
new encounter, for example to capture a change in the purpose of the 
interaction with the record which can happen at the tail of the 
encounter-just-ended. See next thread for an example.

As far as making it easier to change the type of the encounter, can we do one 
or more of the following:

(1) on opening the list of encounters, can it auto-scroll to the bottom item 
(i.e. to the "active" encounter) -- this will make it less work to access the 
button to edit the active encounter

(2) when the "Edit active" button is chosen, can the focus be set into the 
encounter type field, and can this field's text be auto-selected?

(3) can such auto-opening of the encounter editing widget be chained to "Start 
new"?

(4) or, if (3) will annoy GNUmed users for whom the default is usually correct, 
can auto-editing / no-auto-editing be made configurable in praxis settings?

NOTE:  "Start new encounter" can currently be initiated in 3 different places

        via menu
        click of 'N' button
        click of 'Start new' button within the list of encounters window

(5) currently, when editing any of the older encounters (anything other than 
"active") the focus jumps to Summary. Is there a reason to "jump" it there as 
opposed to letting the focus be the same as proposed in (2)?

-- Jim