[Gnumed-devel] gnumed remote control

[J Busser]

I found a small local company (sans EMR) that would be happy to have 
their biller/scheduler used but felt unsure if they had the skills 
(or wanted) to incorporate special code into their product.

So I was thinking, if it would help to avoid a double-entry and 
double-navigation system that would drive secretaries and doctors 
"nuts", whether a workaround could be:

Find a program that can "call" an external piece of code and come up 
with even just one keybinding and menu item to invoke it. (If the 
program cannot / will not do *that*, the user could look instead to 
an automation utility to deliver this function.)

The external code would serve as a "connection piece" (maybe in 
engineering this would be a "regulator"?) and would, based on 
whichever patient is active in the biller/scheduler, permit the user 
to

1. Jump to the current patient in the EMR (GNUmed)
2. Jump *and* update demographics, or
3. Create this (new) patient in the EMR

It could be even simpler if, upon being invoked, the connection piece 
would automatically seek the patient and, if they exist, navigate to 
them and offer the user whether to "Update demographics," default 
could be either "yes" or "no". If the patient is not identified, ask 
"Patient not found. Create new?"

Beyond that, the external code would require only as much help as it 
takes from the biller/scheduler people to define / open the data to 
pass through to the enslaved GNUmed.

Nicer would be for the "calling" billing/scheduler to contain 
individual keybindings and menu items and able to pass --- to the 
connecting piece --- a parameter to signal the user's intent.

So, would the above offer a workable, if imperfect, approach? Does it 
overlap with any piece of code already drafted to control the 
enslaved gnumed?