[Gnumed-devel] A case for partless documents

[James Busser]

Anyone who has had to look through several pages with a choice of  
whether to look at them on paper, on on a computer screen, may prefer  
to look at them on paper if they already existed rather than to just  
scan them and only be able to review their scanned incarnations. And  
if they already existed on paper and the practice had decided to keep  
their paper and *not* go to the trouble of scanning everything, we  
want to be able to support that.

What paper charts lack is any easy way to know, without painful page- 
flipping, what is in there.

The document archive could nicely serve as an index of what is  
available concerning a patient, without *necessarily* having to  
include a scanned copy. Presently the GUI will complain "No pages to  
save. Acquire some pages first."

1) can this please be updated (for consistency) to

        "No parts to save. Acquire some parts first."

2) I suggest that it be configurable whether the widget will allow  
the saving of what is essentially a pointer to the original document.  
This already enjoyed some discussion e.g. with respect to DICOM  
images. A configuration setting would allow the dialog to instead say:

        "No parts to save. Really save an <empty> Document as a reference?"

Default button would be "No" but the user would be permitted to  
choose "Yes". It would be easily decided by the reviewing physician  
if some other user decision needed correction, they could always add  
the part then."

The alternative would be to "create/write" a part that consists only  
of the reference to the paper or external item.