Just a thought here, but with a clearly expressed wish for information
to be available in different formats (rather than the six foot
printout) for different GPs or practices when a patient moves, there is
an obvious opportunity to either standardise the recommended format of
printed out medical records in primary care, or as part of this to
standardise the way in which a dump as text in a file is formatted, and
develop ways of extracting the different views of the data that
different end-users want.
For instance, the printout from Surgery Manager (a poorly supported
legacy system) gives substantially the whole text of encounters, in one
long stream, but it is easy to extract just the name of clinician, type
of encounter, and a 22 character tag for each encounter, which in many
cases would give the recipient the index to what has happened.
FOrmalising this so that the contents list was printed at the beginning
of the canonical printed out EMR and was present at the beginning of a
text file tranferred by any other means would enable us to print a
brief summary, or indeed to add a simple viewer that interpreted the
textbase file and allowed relevant pportions to be printed or pasted.
It would also allow different views to be provided to different users
to fit their needs or wishes, surely the most characteristic virtue of
databased records over written ones.
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