This is ready for development but I have confirmed with Lee we will need to push it back. We can decide whether to consider it for 1.4 after we have worked through the 1.3 scheduled tickets.

Edit 5/24/2016: Need to incorporate some feedback from the user conference, from Casey's session. Specifically: The workflow for converting a group patient into a real patient, storage of non-named group patients (e.g. specimens), lab requests for group patients, and the ability to merge group patients and retain their full group history for auditing purposes (this may need to be a separate ticket, as it is important for legal issues with herd horses)

Full specifications for Group Patients can be found at:
Google Drive\VetView Shared Drive\Functional Specifications\Group Patients.docx

One other thing to consider, specific to past UGA concerns on group records is how to handle prescriptions when a doctor tries to submit a prescription on a group of patients. Specifically the example that comes to mind is a UGA clinician that attempted to submit a prescription from a group record. The initial problem was that the group at large contained both female and male cattle, but the prescription was for something that was only appropriate for female cattle. UGAs pharmacy would not process the prescription because the herd was a mixed male/female herd.

Same issue when the medication is specific to one species, and the group is composed of multiple species. (a common example of this is a rabies vaccine given to several dogs on the farm when the visit itself was generally intended to treat a herd of cattle. They want ot write a script for three rabies vaccines that were submitted, and didn't document the tags or specific rabies given, because their thinking tends to be that these are animals that would otherwise be unvaccinated and are at higher risks of contracting rabies because they roam the farm and or woods around the farm and are more likely to come into contact with a wild, rabid animal.

I think there's been further discussion with some schools about setting up document prompts that are tied to charge entry – so if a rabies vaccine is charged to a bill, it automatically asks for the lot and serial number of the vaccine given, and perhaps a rabies tag number. Maybe we leverage this upcoming feature, and if three are being ordered, we also (on a group record) prompt for a specific patient number to apply the vaccination information to for each quantity of the administered vaccine. Just food for thought. so if I charge for three rabies vaccine dosages, the system prompts for the lot, serial number, and rabies tag number for 3 separate patients, and saves this information against the individual patients.

It would be great if in vetview we could have a function on the admission screen where if an individual patient is created under a client that also has a group patient, if there was an option to instantly add the patient to the group instead of having to manually go back and enter it in. Something along the lines of a pop-up that says, “do you wish this patient to be added to Group X?” (-Kristie Russum).

This would require some kind of key identifier on the patient setup that allows us to indicate that the patient is a group not an individual, and then the logic in the background that says if we are assigning a new patient to a client that has a group under the client, that we then get the pop-up. not sure if this is possible or not, but would be ideal, and very helpful.

The other issue we have run into with UVIS on group records is that UVIS does not nicely allow you to see the history of what was (though it may no longer be) active within a group. In UVIS the only way to be able to see the active members only in the group is to remove any inactive members from the group entirely. This poses a serious problem when considering the two similar group issue that we sometimes have.

If you'd like an example – talk with Casey about the Bear Hollow and Sandy Creek zoo groups. groups like this with fluctuating populations of animals often have animals that simply are no longer in the enclosure, and are presumed to be dead or escaped. The presumed dead ones sometimes show back up – alive. And the missing ones sometimes show back up in another enclosure. This would be far easier to manage if there was a way not only to pull up the animals currently assigned to the farm group as active, but to also be able to see the inactive ones in the same area – so that you prevent as best as possible duplication from occurring. This also bears to mention that far more often than in other populations of patients, group patients (particularly at zoos where sex, age, and breed are sometimes harder to determine) we have entire visits entered into the system on the wrong patient, that then need to be moved to the CORRECT patient administratively.