feature request: analgesic/anesthetic administration table

[nsteinme]

We're being encouraged to have surgery documentation systems that automatically prompt users about what analgesics or other meds are required by protocol to be delivered. I think the simplest way would probably be to set up notifications to the user (by email) when they create a surgery. The user is already selecting 'procedure types' that are part of the surgery, so each one of these could be associated with the required meds. So maybe there would be a table of "meds administration" with fields 'name' (string, name of the medication), 'dosage' (probably just a string describing the calculation or specific amount), 'deadline' (in time relative to procedure) and a 1-multiple relationship between Procedure types and meds administration. Then when the user creates a surgery and selects procedures, the appropriate meds would be triggered and emails sent at the deadline.

Optional components are 1) a system of letting the user mark whether they have completed it or not. This would make it easy to keep reminding people until they do it and easy to programmatically prove that protocol obligations are being met. But, we already have a 'notes' field where people can write what drugs they've given. 2) a way to calculate and communicate dosage based on the known weight of the subject in cases where dosage is weight dependent. again, not critical, if the formula is described in a string people can calculate it themselves.

[k1o0]

Sounds like a good idea. Perhaps we can generalize this a little by having a pharmaceuticals and administrations model. The administrations could have a m2m relationship to pharmaceuticals and procedures, along with a dosage (float) and unit (char) field. A management command that's run as a cron job can queue the notifications and potentially calculate dosage based on recorded weight. The management command will contain logic specific to your lab. Another option could potentially be Django signal callbacks. We would then add a specific notification rule that would trigger email reminders. I'll look into it during the next sprint.

[nsteinme]

Thanks! Happy to keep it as simple as possible, especially for a first version. But definitely your ideas all sound good!