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From: | J Busser |
Subject: | Re: [Gnumed-devel] Gui-Designers was the id_name debate |
Date: | Thu, 16 Sep 2004 18:18:06 -0700 |
At 11:39 PM +0200 9/16/04, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
> > OSCAR refuses to permit you to > > create a patient without entering a date of birth > we have patients who refuse to give us a date of birth.here you can legally see a doctor without giving your correct identityWell, that doesn't mean the database should allow you to insert an inVALID date but rather allow for unknown (for arbitrary reasons) eg. NULL.
Agree
Other options are "impossible" eg. 1.1.1800 or "infinity" or "-infinity" eg. later/earlier than any other valid date.
Don't like these
Yet another possibility would be to assume a pseudo identity with formally valid but factually incorrect demographics.
Surely the above is offered (technically) as a way to satisfy the software at the expense of being governed purely by clinical need. Moreover, is is not remotely possible that a pseudo-identity could be confused as a real patient attribute, and thereby produce a liability situation? Permitting the storing of a date that may be incorrect is a bad idea, because later enquiries which *ought* to match to the patient in question could cause the match to be rejected as "probably not the correct patient" on account of the possibly incorrect date of birth.
BTW what about liability ? I think it might be possible to construe cases where the doctor would have done/recommended certain checks/procedures had he known the real age but didn't in view of the lack of age information ?
I repeat it seems important to be able to create a patient with a date of birth that is any of:
- null (default) or - valid date or- ? possibly - somehow able to be recorded as "believed to be unknowable" or (perhaps) only a year of birth as an approximate year which may or not be correct.
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