Re: [Gnumed-devel] regarding health issues

[Karsten Hilbert]

> What is a health issue? 
Excellent question. I don't have the answer. The solution to
this problem is hard. Dealing with it is fairly easy, though:

A health isssue is what the treating physician considers a
health issue.  :-))

So, the job of us programmers is to give the clinician tools
to add/delete/select/change what she considers to be a health
issue of the patient. That's it.

> Would there be a secondary prompt to connect some more significant
> entries  to a health issue or issues ( ? e.g. a dialog with a browse or
> create health issue functionality  ).
There would be a prompt for selecting an episode.
Each item entered past that will be associated with that
episode. Whenever the clinician desires she can associate
episodes with health issues. Or not. In which case all
episodes (and thus all items) will belong to the __default__
health issue.

> A prompt could come at the end of a consultation , listing all
> significant entries and asking the health issues to be connected,
> or even - at the end of the day or the end of the week, at a peer review
> meeting  ;)
Sure, that's one way (make that episode instead of issue,
though). Personally, I'd prefer a keyboard shortcut, say, ALT-E
that let's me specify the currently active episode (which in
turn defines the issue) during typing. As a surgeon,
pediatrician I'll be dealing with mostly one, rarely two
episodes in one encounter. As a GP with many older patients
that will change to several episodes per encounter on average.
Depending on my discipline of thought I may have to switch
episodes more or less often (as I type in data for the various
episodes).

Karsten
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