Hi all, we've been having a problem with structuring narrative come up on the list recently. It seemed to boil down to this:
People want to be able to structure notes - particularly within one and the same episode of care. Such structuring pertains to one and the same health issue. The problem was that we do not allow more than one open episode per health issue. Currently it is thought that this makes sense along the lines that "a patient can only be sick once for a given disease at any given moment in time". People argued that, however, there are cases where certain quite well distinguishable "lines of attribution" can be found within one sick-episode. There isn't really any arguing with that as anyone practicing GP level care can attest to. During a discussion with our release person Sebastian up came the following thought: If people want to structure free text progress notes why not let them ? And, in fact, not just "allow" but rather programmatically support doing so ? I would imagine this like so: During entering a progress note I feel a need to structure into "poor control" and "foot care". Hence I press, say, <ALT-L> within the progress note editor. This enables me to enter a *L*ist of free text headings I want to structure into. The list is copied *textually* into the current progress note editor field for me to add text under it's headings. The list is also kept in memory for re-use. In other fields of the same progress note editor I can press <ALT-L> again to edit the list and copy it into that field. This allows me to add arbitrary structure to my notes fairly simply. Re-parsing the list in existing text would simply be based on indentation (a bit like Python + Wiki) with some hard-n-fast rules: - list items start in the first column - item content must not start in the first column - the list may not contain empty lines - the list is bounded by empty lines (top/bottom) and/or the start/end of the text field IOW: Break the rules and the list is not recognized. Re-comply with the rules and the list is recognized again. *If* the list was kept in the database per progress note it *could* be re-used across encounters (but needn't be enforced in any way). This would be one level below the formal structure yet would allow for the arbitrary structuring that's apparently needed. One could then write a frontend that stores all the data under a dummy episode and/or health issue and just supports this free list structuring. Does this make any sense ? Karsten -- GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD 4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346 _______________________________________________ Gnumed-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumed-devel
