completely agree with what @jteich said, contacts normally have a follow-up (sometimes daily) to know their status depending on the disease. This is normally collected on paper or in some cases daily calls or manual or automated SMS (e.g. using TextIt). You have surveillance officer assigned to a community that’s doing the monitoring. So the moment the contact meets case definition, this person is taken to the hospital where s/he will be recorded as a patient.
@ibacher in OpenMRS, i think we can already build contacts within using relationship and creating a couple of encounters:
- Case reporting form (CRF) - for the person meeting case definition that collects case information + contacts
- Contact information to add more information like when the last contact was with the suspected/confirmed case
I tried building something in OpenMRS demo to add:
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Relationship types:
- Index / Contact (index may not be the right term or primary - but this is the person meeting case definition and tested positive / if testing is available / or high risk
- Contact / Index
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THen during registration, you register the index case (without relationship) and you fill in the CRF.
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Then register another patient and add the relationship with the index case using the relationship type ‘Index’
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Now if you look at the relationship widget, this Contact person is now related to the Primary/Index case -
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Now the Primary/Index case is also linked to the contact:
John