How do we help the clinician navigate the application with the minimum number of clicks?
What do you consider the basic building blocks for an OPD experience?
Since a clinician does not know the level of documentation required until the patient presents, the clinical documentation needs to be versatile enough to capture the expected and unexpected. Do you prefer structured questions or free text when documenting an encounter?
What level of detail should the refApp have?
Let me hear you thoughts and let me know if you are willing to join the OPD squad to ensure the minimum data required for an OPD encounter is part of the refApp.
Although structured questions are better at capturing data and providing a guide rail to the clinicians, documenting an encounter in the free text helps to cater to multiple specialties without the need for creating and maintaining multiple forms while being much easier to implement at the same time.
The diagrams you shared have covered mostly everything that an OPD system would need. I would also add the following:
Patient document upload: In case a patient brings paper records with them, there should be an ability to attach them to the encounter.
Lab result entry: To enter the lab results in case an LIS is not integrated, or investigations are done at a third-party lab. This may be folded into point 1 also as a stop-gap solution.
Reports: Operational reports about the facility, e.g.: number of visits today, demographic distribution of patients, number of new patients/revisits etc.
I see that Appointment Management is included here. We might also want to include queue management too (for different locations/services) as part of OPD. PIH is actively developing Appointments and Queues right now (we have a Squad for that)
