Application Name: Platform Version Number: 2.0.1
Question: Is it not possible to register a patient without an identifier? Or at least make it optional?
I don’t think it’s necessary for our current workflow in the health center. Also, there already is a patient Id and a person Id anyway, and that’s all I need.
At least one patient identifier is required. I would discourage you from building workflows that depend on internal ids. It’s simple when you start, but becomes very fragile. Internal ids are guaranteed to be internally consistent for foreign key references; however, there is no guarantee that internal ideas remain constant. For example, when patients are merged. You will also run into problems if you ever expand to more than one server, when aligning interbal ids is impractical. That is why we lean on UUIDs for computers to share data and identifiers (medical record numbers) when humans share data.
I see. If that’s the case how can I make the Identifiers auto-generated (without installing another module). Manually filling it up every time someone adds a patient isn’t exactly ideal.
The idgen module is the most widely used solution and will eventually be incorporated into the platform, so I would recommend using it if you are looking for the simplest approach (e.g., the registration module us s it).
If you didn’t want to use idgen, you’d need to build your business logic for patient identifiers into your application some other way (e.g., create logic to create an identifier behind the scenes without prompting for it). Even if you simply copied the internal identifier (losing the benefit of a check digit), you’d at least be protected as long as you didn’t assume (in other code) that patient id and identifier always will match. We made that mistake with concept IDs and are still paying for it.