OK - I understand the desire to keep the design clean - and adding a Notes field to the visit record violates that.

The underlying problem I am trying to solve is to make the processes of adding/correcting the visit reason/summary [and the new diagnosis/presenting codes] and adding a visit note faster. [Note that in our case, a significant number of visits do not get a reason because they are not created via appointment check-in, but rather from the invoice.  This happens with the house call vet who does not run off an OPV appointment list, a) because he uses Google Calendar; and b) because a large number of his appointments are multi-patient.

My suggestion of tweaking the note editor to also allow you, on the one screen, to set/edit the visit reason etc appears to have been met with little enthusiasm.

Hence the idea of adding a long text field to the visit record - in the standard simple case, the medical record will contain the visit record and a consult service charge, and a couple of medication items. Moving what is currently a Note into the Visit record allows the data entry to be streamlined: bang in the invoices items (creates the visit), click on the patient name in the invoice line item to flick to Patient|Medical records, double click the visit record, enter the reason/summary and the long text, the  Alt-O or OK and you have done that patient, the switch back to the Customers workspace and, if there are more patients,  crank in the next patient's invoice items, else finalise the invoice.

I played with the archetype (this done in a 1.7.1 system), and came up with:

Note the switch to 'Precis' rather than Note.   This is meant to convey the fact that if this is a simple visit, then all the text can go here. For long things like hospital visits, the Notes are used to record each days activities. [I thought about just pushing out the size of the reason/summary field - but 255 is the max allowed by the acts file. Hence the addition of /details/precis.]

Note also that I adjusted the field order to bring Summary and Precis to the top so you don't have tab across the less commonly used fields.

The one thing I cannot do in my 1.7 system is adjust the medical records display.  I can modify IMObjectTableModelFactory.xml (in openvpms-web-workspaces-1.7.1.jar) to display the Precis, but it does not have any effect.  I think that this is because PatientClinicalEventActTableModel ignores the modification to the xml file which I adjusted to:

   <entry>
     <string>act.patientClinicalEvent</string>
     <string>concat(/description,expr:if(boolean(/details/precis),concat('&#10;',/details/precis),''))</string>
   </entry>

So I would ask that a long text field be added to the visit record.  If necessary, make it a hidden field in the standard archetype.  Those who want to use it can simply unhide the field and then make use of the facility.

Regards, Tim G