what is the difference between MedicationDispense vs MedicationAdministration fhir? Functionally speaking
I am BA and I'm trying to figure out what is actually retrieved when using one or the other. Devs are all new to this FHIR too.
If you read the descriptions there are subtleties but not clear definitions.
For example, are MedicationDispense medications that my doctor GP prescribed and I bought at the pharmacy? Are MedicationAdministration only those given to me when I am under care at home or hospital? Seems like a thin line.
MedicationDispense is used to track the supply of a medication (typically a prescribed medication) for patient use. In out-patient settings, it tracks the provision of a supply of medication to a patient or their representative - typically for periods of 30 days or longer. In in-patient settings, it is generally used to track the supply of a medication from the pharmacy to the ward (possibly per day or longer, but sometimes on a per-dose basis). In both cases, it tracks only the supply of the medication, not that it has actually been consumed by the patient. It is not uncommon for a medication to be dispensed but not administered (or not administered as planned).
MedicationAdministration tracks a single consumption of a dose of a medication. A completed MedicationAdministration means the patient is believed to have actually ingested/been injected with/otherwise appropriately therapeutically received the substance. It is typically only used in in-patient settings where a nurse or other practitioner records the occurrence of an injection, an IV adjustment, the witnessing of a patient swallowing an oral medication, etc. However, it can also be created by home health monitoring solutions. E.g. if a patient tracks their medication consumption with a mobile phone app, the app would create a MedicationAdministration instance for each dose of medication the patient (or spouse or other caregiver) records. Aside from that exception, administrations aren't generally tracked for outpatients.
The main differences are:
a MedicationDispense is accompanied by medication instructions indicating the timing and dosage instructions for how the supplied medication should be used. The quantity dispensed is typically sufficient for multiple doses and is NOT necessarily intended to be taken all at once.
a MedicationAdministration is not accompanied by instructions. Instead it simply captures what was administered at a particular point in time, or for IV or other continuous medications, over a specific period of time at a given rate.
The business processes they're associated with are quite different. If you feel the descriptions could be improved to make the differences clearer, feel free to propose language using the 'propose a change' link at the bottom of any page in the FHIR specification.
I wanted to use drools for one of our projects - Online Buying and Selling.
Events are like Buying a book, Buying a pen, Buying a kindle.
These events are stored in a database.
Now, based on the events happened before, I want to decide the consequence.
Like say if a person had the following sequence,
1. Buy a book at a price.
2. Sell the same book at a higher price.
Then
Do something based on that.
If someone has done this,
1. Buy a kindle.
2. Purchase a book in Science Section of books.
Then
show him the relevant content in the UI.
I have all the listed things as Events in the database.
Now I have written an interface for the Actions to be done and I have also done the interface to pass a Customer when an event happens.
Now what would give me the best performance to process the events and make a decision based on the sequence of events. I cannot store all the events in memory for sure as I have a whole lot of those.
There are different aspects to consider:
For recommending additional items to customers, there are Recommendation Engines. You may want to use one of those, if most/all of Your use-cases are recommendations.
Storing "all the events in memory" is not neccessarily required. In fact, Drools removes events that are no longer relevant to the rule base. The documentation says
"Events may be automatically expired after some time in the working memory. Typically this happens when, based on the existing rules in the knowledge base, the event can no longer match and activate any rules. Although, it is possible to explicitly define when an event should expire."
To allow early removal of events, I would use Drools to generate aggregated data like "likes science topics", "owns a e-book reader", etc. Those can be inferred from the events but consume less memory.
I am trying to create a health application of a rather sensitive nature which will require some form of cryptography/obfuscation. There is a health study in which once a year, known individuals with permanent and recognisable identifier numbers (eg KIG0005001 as an individuals identifier) walk into the clinic, are identified, have their blood tested as part of a study. Next year, the same happens again, as this is a longitudinal study. Now the results of the blood test should NOT be able to be traceable to an actual individual (HIV status, etc are highly sensitive bits of information that should not be linkable with actual individuals due to their right to privacy), but it is IMPERATIVE that we can identify year on year which blood samples belong to one unique individual (without knowing WHO the individual actually is, the emphasis is on the blood samples being traceable to one individual, not the individual).
My idea (and here is where am asking for your expertise in cryptography and obfuscation) is that when the individual visits the clinic they come with an identifying card with their regular id number KIG0005001 . This number is entered into a system where via an algorithm/encryption it spits out a barcode (based on the original id KIG0005001 , therefore any future visits should produce the SAME barcode for a particular individual) which can be printed out as stickers. These barcode stickers are the ones to be used to identify the samples (stick em on the samples). The stickers should have the following information in them: unique identifier (via barcode?), the round number that the sample was taken (samples will be taken once a year, so year 1= round 1) and date sample taken.
Is this possible? What are the alternatives? How/What should I do in terms of transforming KIG0005001 into an encrypted barcode which is repeatable year on year (so blood sample can always be traced back to the same source). Am programming in Java.
Thanks in advance,
Tumaini
To answer this question, I don't think it needs to be in the barcode section.
First of all, there is no way to keep everything 100% secure... but you can make it more complicated to be understood by a human.
It's the same thing as the passport controversy... A biometric passport must be secure: it's not possible to read the information without knowing the "private key". But let's say you read and record everybody's passport that enters your store and save it to a database. You will be able to trace who is coming back and even what they previously bought since you have their passport's ID...
To make the life harder for your employees, you need to generate an ID that will match the real person's ID. So if the employee is testing the blood of KIG0005001, they will receive a different unique ID for that day; the computer will know how to link them up. So that your employee has no idea who is this number at that moment...
Cryptography is probably useless here since you work with IDs. Even a gibberish data repeated multiple time is still an ID.
I want to make a little free calendar program to help me and others calculate how much time we have got left in a project. I mean real working time, not just time. Time in a raw form is not saying much.
Typically when my boss tells me that I have time until 05-05-2011 it doesn't tell me really how much time I have to do my job.
You know...so many things stop me from work:
A) beeing at home, not at work (so called "free time" or "spare time"). That is in my case I work exactly 8 hours a day and then the cleaning ladies throw me out of the office with their incredible loud industrial vacuum cleaners every evening (my boss accepts that as an excuse to go home in time, regularly).
B) weekends, or more precisely saturdays and sundays
C) official holiday rescuing me from having to go to work.
what I want to do is make a little utility which tells me how many working hours I really have in a given time period.
The first two things A and B are pretty easy to implement. But the last thing C scares my pants off. Holidays. OOOHHH man. You know what that means. Chaos. Pure chaos.
The huge question is: HOW TO CALCULATE HOLIDAYS?!
Since I want my program to be useful for anyone anywhere in the world, I can't just hardcode all holidays for my little town.
So which options do I have?
I) I could hand-craft downloadable lists of holidays. Users search them within the application and download them from an webserver. Or I ship all of them in the package. But I would get very, very old if I tried that by myself for every country, state and town.
II) I make an initial data sheet with holidays for my town, and don't care about the rest. However, I make that sheet with an how-to public, so that everyone who feels like beeing very nice can provide holiday data for his country / region / whatever. Those are made public on a webserver and everyone can get the data packages he/she needs for the app.
III) ?
I care a lot about usability. I don't want to make an ugly linux hack style hard to use app that only computer freaks can use.
So you need to tell me more about holiday science. I was never really clever at this. I assume every single country in the world has it's own set of holidays. In every country there may be several states. For example the US has some, and Germany has also some states. Holidays vary from state to state. But I know from an good programmer he told me never assume anything. So the questions about holiday science are:
Which categories do I need to make holiday-data-packs searchable? A guy from India should find quickly his holiday data pack, and a guy from Sillicon Valley should find his pack as equally fast. It makes most sense to me to filter for COUNTRY > STATE > WHATEVER. Like a drill-down-search. Did I miss something?
What would be the best data format to hold holiday information? A holiday has a start and end date and a name. That should be enough. Would I put all this stuff in thousands of XML files?
How would you go about this? Any hint / help is highly welcome! Thanks to everyone!
We use a table.
It should not be that hard. If you look at your corporate holiday schedule you should be able to calculate the list of around 10 days. The only problem is that many of these are arbitrary. i.e Christmas falls on a Saturday so give the Friday before off.
Have you looked at this site to calculate the list of known Holidays ?
Many organizations post their holiday schedule on the web, it might be possible to read that and get the schedule ?
In this case, I would suggest that you are encountering less of an engineering problem and more of a data collection problem.
Rather than define a "definitive set of holidays" for each possible user, allow the user to easily setup his holidays. By offering a (usable, quick, easy) way for users to select holidays, you do not make any assumptions.
You could even make it "social" by allowing users to upload their selections - imagine your HR department takes 10 minutes to setup and upload a set of holidays for all your company employees. Now you just need to provide a way for everyone to find that set.
On another topic, I would suggest using a common format, like iCal to store your calendar data. Here's a page with some example iCal files.
I have a form that asks users to enter a start and end time for an event. For many years, we have allowed them to enter the times by selecting the hour (1-12), minute (1-60), and AM/PM from three drop down boxes. This has worked fine without complaints from customers. However, today I was hit with a request to change the input to one text box for the user to enter time in military time (aka 0000 - 2359). In my gut I believe this is a bad idea but am having trouble coming up with any hard facts.
What are the best reasons I can give that this would be a bad idea?
If there is a better solution for entering time, what would it be?
Also, FYI the users filling out the form run the gamut from very little skill with computers to advanced users. They are in no way military related.
Update: All my users are local and no other forms (web or print) use military time as the standard.
Three dropdowns are a nightmare usability-wise. You can cut these down to two by eliminating AM/PM and moving to 24-hour format, but still: a dropdown with 60 items is overkill.
I'd much prefer to enter time "manually", provided that these input boxes will be intelligent enough (say, they should be able to convert 18 to 1800, 0 to 0000, allow : as a separator, etc.). Plus do not allow users to enter incorrect data in the first place.
To answer your question: I see no reason to disallow your users to do what they want. After all, they are users.
Well, from a user interface standpoint, this could be a mistake simply according to some of Jakob Nielsen's user interface heuristics:
"Match between system and real world." If your users are not used to entering dates in military time, asking them to do so for your app can be distracting at best, and frustrating at worst.
"Error prevention" You are not eliminating error-prone conditions, but possibly introducing them.
There is also the question of why this change is being made. Are customers complaining? Is data coming in incorrectly? As mentioned by others, are your users used to military time? Any interface change should happen for a reason, IMO, because you're going to change the user experience and there will be ramifications for that; it's just a matter of how large those ramifications will be. My assumption is that data entry errors are supposedly going to be avoided -- but are they? Asking a user to enter a time as "XX:XX" and parsing out the semicolon (or, as Aaron Digulla stated, ANY non-number characters) and then converting it as needed seems less likely to result in errors than asking a user to enter a time in a format they are not used to using daily.
My concern would be that a user wants to enter 3:30 PM, and, while not paying much attention, simply enters 330. This is now 3:30 AM, and the user will never know the difference, because the app takes the information and happily assumes that this is what is meant. However, allowing the user to enter the time in "XX:XX" format and having an "AM/PM" selection makes much more sense.
As far as hard facts, well, I don't have them either. But if your boss/client won't be swayed by Nielsen's heuristics, I'm not sure what can change their mind.
Oh my.
My advice is to quit and find a different project.
We did a scheduling app for a "military customer" - and even they could not agree on what constituted "military time". Half of them wanted something called "Zulu Time" - the other half wanted "GMT plus offset" - then some wanted local time in 24h format. Contrary to what our contract specified, a Colonel insisted we use "Zulu" - we made the change for political reasons (in violation of our contract) - and then HE missed showing up for a scheduled event, because he thought it was in local time. Then contract management came down on us like a ton of bricks.
(never mind that the published schedule also used an obsolete "offset" that was a cold-war holdover meant to "fool the Russians").
In that this is just me sharing a war-story. . .
The real answer is to Elicit Requirements from your customer. Get those requirements SPECIFICALLY written into your contract. Make sure that the stakeholder who is actually writing your check, agrees. Develop to that specification exactly. When someone complains tell them to pay for a contract mod. You'll probably be changing this back and forth among many different settings for the next 10 years. You'll have steady work, and you'll understand why military contracts frequently go way over budget and are never on schedule.
"They are in no way military related."
That's a good enough reason for me. It's an uncommon format that, while not exactly "user-hostile," is nonetheless not the way most of us are used to seeing dates, and requiring your users to do the conversion in their head will lead to arithmetic errors eventually.
That said, drop-down boxes aren't great either. Best to go with 2 input boxes and an AM/PM dropdown, in my opinion.
It may not be a bad idea. Imagine the case where users must enter that bit of information lots of times, for example because they are in call support. Or they may find the dropdown boxes not usable enough, even after having tried them. They may prefer that other format.
It is usually a good idea to talk to the stakeholder and ask him: "Why do you want it this way?" you can then contrast their ideas with yours, but if yours are only that you have the "gut" feeling that this is not right, guess who will win the argument. The gut feeling is not a valid business argument - especially when the business is not yours.
So in short, do what your customer wants - just make sure that they understand their options well, and point out to them any inconvenience that they may have foreseen - once you find one, that is.
Honnestly, I think using AM/PM format is a bad practice, but that may be because I'm used to the 24 hours scale.
One reason against is that if all your users are used to the 12H scale, then most of them might still enter 1:00 instead of 13:00 for 1:00. Since the PM is not here, it will result in mistakes.
However, one good reason to do the switch is simply because it's the international standard.
Depending of what you want to put the emphasis (speed or functionality) you can use a time picker that would rely on regional setting to diplay the time in the user format or use a clock-like control. If speed is important, you might prefer a simple mask-textbox.
Hmmm, describing the 24 hour clock as "military time" and then noting that the users are not military makes me a more than a little twitchy.
It will depend on your users but I think that it is more than reasonable to expect people in contemporary society to understand the 24 hour time format and to be able to enter times using that format (given that I would - possibly naively - expect that format to be in use for bus, train, plane and other timemtables almost universally for the simple reason that its unambiguous). Perhaps this is not true worldwide - but it is certainly true across Europe.
That said, changes need to be made for a reason - "if it ain't broke..." is a very sound maxim for a working site and whilst I wouldn't ever willingly use am/pm for time entry I don't have a problem with use of dropdowns for time entry - especially as one can type "into" them. In this case I think that going from drop downs to text boxes is most likely an opportunity to introduce errors (although again it rather depends on the users).
I can see why you think this is a bad idea, silly users input wrong format etc.
However have you considered a jQuery Masked input box?
In my own frames, I accept times and dates in a wide variety of formats. When the field loses focus, I'll try to parse the input and format it into the "correct" or "official" format. This gives the user a nice way to enter the data and a visual cue when something is wrong.
For example, in a date field, I'll accept "1" as "01.12.2009" (current month+year). In a time box, I'll accept "1030", "10 30", "10.30" (i.e. I just filter out anything which isn't a number). "010409 1125" becomes 1. April 2009, 11:25am.
Few outside the united states knows the words "military time". They also prefer 24-hour format.
If you want globalization, you can do one of the two:
use accepted and de-facto standards, such as ISO8601 date format, 24h time and speak English
dive into the nightmare of the vast regional-based localization complexity (some unfortunate programmers have to do it anyway. Then they support AM/PM, unicode and never-showing-yellow-color for certain cultures)
I cannot believe how much consideration this idea has gotten.
Forcing your user to do things your way, because it's "more efficient" is a terrible idea.
Your forms should be both streamlined (power users can enter data quickly from the keypad) and comprehendible (first time users can navigate successfully). The conversion to 24 hour time will throw people immediately. I lived in Quebec for almost six years and still had troubles switching back and forth from 24hour time. DON'T DO THIS.
Just in addition to all the rest of comments you should thing about one more thing.
Programmers and designers usually think the client pays us just for creating what he tells us to... That's only half true. They pay us, even if they don't realize it, for telling them what they need, what's best for them.
Of course, the final decision is always theirs, as the pay, but if you feel it is wrong and you think you know the business model better than them, then do not blindly accept whatever they told you to do.
You might want to consider using the jQuery timepicker (or Telerik DateTimePicker in Time-only mode for WinForms) and also build in support, on the backend, for multiple formats in the event that javascript is disabled.
date/time input through select boxes is a horrible UI design.
but, if some of your users come from the few countries that stick to AM/PM for time format, then forcing the "military" format on them without assistance from the program is also bad.
use something like the jQuery masked input plugin.
if i was doing this, i would use a masked text input and a "PM" checkbox: if the value is more than 1259, the checkbox is disabled. otherwise, it's clear by default.
Why not use a TimePicker control of some sort?
You shouldn't force non-military users to user a strange to them time format.
In any case, assuming that all input is by logged-in users, you can provide multiple mechanisms (and certainly multiple ways if displaying time) and make the choice a user preference. But I'd strongly recommend that whatever you do, for any given user times should be entered and displayed in a consistent manner.