Re: [Gnumed-devel] demographics.sql

[James Busser]

On Mar 2, 2004, at 6:54 PM, Ian Haywood wrote:
> 2/ Numbers, such as "Medicare number", "provider number, etc." 
> Obviously totally
> locale and context specific. In the backend and business layer its 
> easily to generalise
> like we do with comms channels, but difficult at the GUI level.
> Should we have
> if locale == "AU"
> ......
> elif locale == "DE":
> ....
>
> or somethng else? I'm not sure what.

The locale may not be narrow enough (e.g. states / provinces within a 
country) - also patients may have more than one such "number"  to 
support multiple payers' accounting / billing needs, also the question 
of whether to extend to most cleanly handle medical record and other 
numbers.

Should we support more than one value per patient, where each value 
would need to relate to, and be characterized and controlled by a table 
specifying:

the Agency --- e.g. national, state, regional or provincial health 
governing body name; private health insurer name; credit card company 
name; the local hospital or biomedical lab's name
the Entity (Datum) name or label --- e.g. medicare #, account #, client 
#, card #, MRN, lab ID#
the Entity (Datum) validation formula --- e.g. min/max # characters, 
zero-fill, mod() criteria

Where it is useful to do so, a "locale" could specify a default for 
entry during new patient creation and for display but I expect should 
be controllable within the practice, which might like to prompt more 
than one of these to be entered upon new patient creation.

I wonder if it is also here that the patient's unique key (used within 
Gnumed) could be displayed although read-only.