[Gnumed-devel] type of search pattern for demographics

[Richard Terry]

Ok, am up to undertanding the actual search logic. I think your logic is
currently overkill, however:

some dumb questions

In my program my thinking was something like this

1)commonest: I know patient well he  peter blackwell:

- I type in  pe bl <enter> or bl,pe

        if > 1 pe bl up pops list and I choose, else single result
 (though with experience if this is the case with him I'd type pet bla to get
a single result)

2) next: remember firstname, not whole of second

- I type peter b > list > recognise surname

3) know his name is peter, cannot remember any surname

- I t ype ,peter, up comes list of all the peters

In any scenario the query is something like:

Select * from patients where 'firstname like 'pe*' and lastname like 'bl*',
order by id, surname, firstname, street, suburb, postcode, dob. > list> pick
one. Name is plonked in top bar and under the hood the datbase is queried for
all the clinical records for a patient with the unique Id from this query.

Now I can here your objections.  I cannot however think of ANY situations
where I have ever had to do an instring search of surname or lastname,
however I think this option should be present for completeness, and perhaps
usefull ness.

So question: How come you just get the patients Id:

ids = self.pat_searcher.get_patient_ids(curr_search_term), which yields 8 and
9 and will force  you to do another query when the result is picked -
whearase you could get all the basic info in one hit, as you are, even in a
huge hospital with thousands of beds only going to be getting a small number
of similar names anyway. In any case, you most often will not be able to
identify the patient by firsname, surname and DOB, moreoften we use the
suburb , and in fact where in doubt one usually asks the patient 'Do you live
in Market st Cooks Hill, or 'do you live in dudley etc.

As an idea we could use that little button next to the search box to pop up a
little list of how to search options eg

[ ] firstname surname e.g j sm = jane smith
[ ] surname,firstname e.g sm,j = smith, jane
[x] part surname, part surname = mi an
[ ] Date of Birth

etc etc


Regard

Richard