How does it presently work for the German db?
As far as competing priorities, I agree that "intelligent" allergy
handling is a future-item in terms of *implementation* but IMO may
be good to think about it already. My big-picture question when
discussing medical "intelligence" is how much to build into the EMR
and how much to outsource to clinical decision support (CDS)?
When a patient reports an allergic reaction, the EMR may do as
little as report the exact substance that was taken. How widely
applicable to other substances becomes a matter of clinical
judgement and expertise.
It would be nice for an EMR to support ~ "one optional level of
extra clinical intelligence" while still letting outside resources
help when a user may be unaware or incorrectly recall or judge a
situation. So in the example of the penicillin allergy it may be
good that
- an EMR, at the patient level, allows a judgement to extend an
allergy more broadly (without a subsystem of expert knowledge inside
GNUmed because this would be heavy lifting)
- the interoperating system (FreeDIams), when fed "dumb" allergy
information, could still prompt the user... maybe FD can eventually
support computational + table based prompts for drug-allergy and
drug-disease interactions, or maybe this would be maintained in some
separate open source expert system that both GNUmed and FreeDiams
can access