Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> I will take your word for it here and draw from your > experience. Let's perhaps not think of > vacc_indication.description as "disease to be vaccinated > against" but rather "agreed-upon human-comprehensible > indication identifier". This is complex, as all vaccine epitopes do target a single disease entity, the point is that not usually the way we use them (at least here) Currently about the only time a vaccine is given by disease is when we want to give hep b vaccine to an injecting drug user or health-care worker. Oh, and Q-fever for meatworkers (do you have Q-fever in germany?) The rest of the time we are giving according to a schedule, either because the patient has reached a certain age, or they wish to travel to a certain country. Personally I think we should aim for a "fully automatic" system: the vaccine dialogue computes the outstanding vaccinations based on the patient's age, plus a short list of "high-level" indications such as - meatworker - blood-borne disease risk (currently == hepB, but when we get hepC vax this means we will have a formal "schedule" for these people) - travel to africa - travel to S.E asia - travel to South America - Indigenous (they get pneumococcal and influenza at an eariler age, from 50 IIRC) Oh, asthmatics and a few others get pneumo+flu as well, so there is a good case for linking vaccine indications to disease codes. The means we *do* need schedule_max_age, so we don't try to vaccinate the 75-year-old Sudanese refugee grandmother against whooping cough. ian _______________________________________________ Gnumed-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumed-devel
