Re: [Gnumed-devel] important point regarding episode/health issue

[Karsten Hilbert]

Or in other words:

A Clinical Health Issue is stateless patient data. Either the
patient does have the issue or not. Whether he does have it
does not depend on anyone. Whether we *know* she has it
depends on us. Clinical Health Issues are meant to persist.

A Clinical Episode is stateful data in a way. An episode ends
at some point which we may or may not explicitely note down.
It is meant to persist across encounters, anyways, until we
(or some heuristics) decide to finalize that episode.

A Clinical Encounter, OTOH, is non-persistant (but still
stateful) data. It is NOT meant to persist across, well,
encounters :-)  Some systems have a waiting list. Once the
encounter is finished the doctor moves the patient entry to
another list "treated_today" or fully removes the patient
entry. This is a finalizing signal that could be used to
finish off with "this" encounter and wipe the row from the
"ongoing_encounters" table.

Karsten
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