| Hubris | Designing GP Clinical Systems19. Displaying treatment history usefully |
Index
The display of previous treatments should enable the user to answer the questions they most commonly ask, very easily.
- What drugs has the patient had
- Has this patient ever had ...this drug
- Did any do harm
- Were they successful
- Why were they given - or at least, in order to treat what.
- What have we previously treated this condition with and what effect did it have
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Most of the treatments recorded will be drugs prescribed by the GP, but the questions above may need inclusion of drugs prescribed in hospital or bought over the counter, and other therapies such as Physiotherapy.
The display should also be meaningful in time and type
- Treatments by year (last year, year before etc)
- Treatments ever
- alphabetically
- by action group
- by frequency of administration or total dosage
Handling notes of adverse or beneficial outcomes implies the use of a link, tag, or field depending on the model used to store the information and present it, which appears with the treatment history details and leads to or displays the outcome.
Current presentations of treatment in UK GP systems seem to be simple lists of prescriptions which have been printed, or alternatively a list of all prescriptions with a list of dates for each on which it was issued.
I prefer to summarise prescriptions as a cross-tab of all preparation names, with the dates first and last issued, and the number of issues. At present I print it (for referral letters or when patients leave and their notes must follow them on paper) in alphabetical order, but it could equally well be in order of last issue, or of first issue. Presented as a live record of course, it can be toggled through those presentations.
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