Hi all,
I brought up an idea buried in an email during the Provider Attribute
thread a few weeks ago, but it was lost a bit in all of the many other
points being made, so I wanted to raise it here again explicitly.
I think making the link between Provider and Person optional is a
mistake. Here is my reasoning:
* A Provider in OpenMRS is not meant to be a subclass. It is meant to
be a particular role in the health care system that a Person can have.
And a person may have many of these.
* The most similar thing we have in OpenMRS to this is User. No users
are allowed in OpenMRS without being associated with a Person. User is
probably more accurately thought of as a User Account. Clearly a single
Person can hold multiple User Accounts.
* The only real reason I can see for making Person optional is so that
we can avoid having to require things like "gender", "birthdate", etc.
on Provider that have traditionally been required of Person at the
database and API levels. For example, if we are uploading a list of
10,000 providers from a national registry, and all we have is a String
name, and no gender or birthdate data. However, I think a more valid
solution to this problem is just to remove those data model and API
restrictions, and to make Person not require this data. Then, we just
move those validation constraints onto the Patient object if we desire
(though to be honest we don't always have this information here either,
particularly if we are importing data from a legacy system).
So, I realize we are at RC3 for 1.9 and all, but my proposal would be to:
* Make Person not null on Provider
* Make gender and birthdate nullable on Person
This is particularly relevant to our team at PIH as we are currently
building a Provider Management module on top of 1.9. Mark has had to
bake in the assumption that all Providers have Person records (at least
those that can be managed with this module), because this is required
for many of our use cases - in particular the notion that Providers are
linked to their Patients and to other Providers via Relationships.
I would be interested to hear others thoughts on this or if any of my
assertions / assumptions are just wrong.
Thanks,
Mike
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