[Health] Recognizing newborns as patients

[Hedayat Vatankhah]

Hi,

We are investigating the possibility of using GNU Health in a children specific health center in Iran. This center treats newborns from other hospitals too. It seems that we cannot adopt GNU Health in its current form to the needs of this center. It seems that we really need to register a newborn as a patient in the system, because newborns in this hospital are really "patients", but they also should have newborn specific information (e.g. the APGAR score) so we need both patient and newborn functionality. Our conclusion is that a newborn should actually be registered as a patient in the system. It has an added benefit that we can track the full history of a person, including its newborn info. Also, "patient" module can decide about the relevant info for a specific patient based on his/her age: e.g. if (s)he is a newborn, newborn sheets should be included. It might recognize other groups as well (newborn, child, adult, elderly).

We are probably going to implement such functionality, but before that we'd like to know about your opinions about such a change, and if there is anything wrong with such an implementation.

Regards,

Hedayat