Database Design

Olga and I met Saturday and we really did hammer out a database design.  (It was more that than a data model, but it should roughly suffice for both.)

One big question between us was how to view the different pieces of patient information.  Would we organize them around “visits” (like an office visit) or around individual items like tests, symptoms, etc.  One thing that’s kind of difficult to remember is that you can always make it LOOK like it’s organized any way you want - you can make the user interface look like it’s organized by visit if you want, but then take the data and do whatever you want with it, and later spit it out a whole different way.  Or the same way.  Or a third way.

Anyway, we had a lot of arguing and I think it was really productive.  (Of course by “arguing” I don’t mean that we were angry or anything like that.  But for the first time we had actual real arguments about what to do, and I thought they went well, and that’s important.)

I think our database model is going to work well, at least as a start.  It’s always possible we’ll scrap the whole thing later if it doesn’t work out.

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