Fill-in fields - Letters but not forms?
I am trying to build a hospital admission 'form'. I can access most of what I need (customer, patient name, etc) but there are a couple of fields that are not in the system - such as the estimated charges).
This is an obvious use for a Fill-In field. However, it would appear that these are not supported in 'forms', only 'letters'.
However, if I make the hospital admission form a Patient Letter, then it does not get presented as an available form at check-in time - only 'Patient Forms' are presented to choose from during the checkin.
Is there a reason for Fill-Ins not being available on a Patient Form?
Regards, Tim G
Re: Fill-in fields - Letters but not forms?
The key difference is that documents generated from Letter templates are saved, whereas Forms are generated each time they are printed or viewed.
If Forms had Fill-Ins, you get prompted each time.
Can you use a Letter template, and manually create the document via the Documents tab in the Visit Editor?
Re: Fill-in fields - Letters but not forms?
Humm - interesting. Yes I can (and in fact have) done it as a letter.
I just ran an experiment - generated a form; changed the template, generated a new form; looked at the first one - it includes the changes to the template. Is the following a correct summary to go into the CSH?
With forms, all that is kept is a reference to the template. Hence forms are a low cost (in terms of database storage) method for a) generating the form; b) recording in the record that it was generated - but it does NOT keep a record of the form as it was given to the customer.
Letters on the other hand store both the template used and the generated information, and thus record what the customer was given (including what was entered in response to any fill-in prompts) and the data current at the time (such as the patient's age).
Say we have a very simple OpenOffice (or Word) document that says in effect "Patient's age is <<patient.entity.age>>". We now use this as the document content for both a Patient Letter and a Patient Form template, and we add both of these to the patient's medical records.
If we come back in a year's time and print both again, the form will show the patient's current age, but the letter will show the age when it was orginally added to the record.
Hence if you need to record what was given to the customer, you should use a letter and not a form. Remember of course that if you need to record that the customer actually signed the letter to indicate agreement, then you need to scan the signed letter and attached the scanned image to the records.
---end CSH
Tim - let me know if the above correctly describes the set up and I will add it to the CSH text.
I think that this is further evidence that there is a need to implement https://openvpms.atlassian.net/browse/OVPMS-1085 with the addition that one can choose a letter (as well as a form) to be a check-in document.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Fill-in fields - Letters but not forms?
The CSH text looks fine.
Regarding OVPMS-1085, the corresponding project is http://www.openvpms.org/project/new-style-document-selector which needs some feedback before it can be costed.
-Tim