GNU Health/Individuals

Contents

1 The Individual

2 Review of concepts
3 Your first Individual in GNU Health

3.1 Demographics

3.2 Contact Information

The Individual
It's time to enter the essential unit of GNU Health, the person. We take the person as a
unique individual, yet, somebody that is part of a family, interacts with the community
and makes up our society. This entity is so important that it's impossible to achieve good
public health programs without information about the individuals. This concept that
might seem trivial, is very often overlooked.

Review of concepts
We mentioned in the First Steps the concept of Party.
A party is an abstract entity, which attributes will
differentiate a health center from a person, or a
person that is a doctor, a patient or both. The concept
of party is extremely simple, yet very powerful and
versatile.
Tree view of Parties in GNU Health
At this point is important to go back and refresh the on Tryton framework
Terminology used in GNU Health.

Your first Individual in GNU Health

Follow the menu : Party -> Parties

You will be presented with a Tree view (listing) of the parties in the system. Take a look
at the screen shown in this section. I have selected / Highlighted three parties. "Ana
Betz", "Cameron Cordara" and "GNU Solidario Hospital". They are all parties (entities),
but their attributes make Ana a patient, Cameron a doctor and GNU Solidario Hospital a
Health Institution.

Of course, under this model, you can have, for instance, a health professional that is
also a patients. Don't forget that doctors are people :-)

To create a new record, click on the new record icon, or type Ctrl+N. You will be
presented with the new party form view.

In a multidisciplinary team, the following information is usually done by the

administration office, the front desk or sometimes by the social workers.

In this example, we will focus on Ana Betz. Let's go over the main fields:

Name: This is a required field, denoted by the blue background. Required fields
must be entered otherwise you won't be able to save the record.
Lastname: Enter the lastname as appears in the ID card. Some countries use only
the father's name, other use a combination of the father and the mother.
Alias: Nickname (if any) of the person. Surprisingly enough, in many places
around the world, people use nicknames to refer a particular person, and
sometimes they don't know the real name. If that person has an alias / nickname,
you should enter it on the system. It might be key to know about a missing person.
Party Attributes: At this point, set the Person checkbox. Just check this one. Don't
enable any other at this point.

Before going into the patient demographics. save your work. As a general rule, is
important so save your work while working on records, to avoid losing your unsaved
data, specially in long records. To save the person, click on the save this record icon or
type Ctrl+S.

Demographics

The information entered in this section is very

important at both individual and population level. The
health professionals and authorities will have
precious information for them to make good health
programs and to assess the social determinants of
health.

Here you enter the person's date of birth, Social

Security Number, citizenship, sex, profession, the
Person demographics in GNU
Domiciliary Unit, education level and marital
Health
status, among others. Other models (eg, patient)
modules (eg, socioeconomics) will make extensive use
of these field. Most of the fields are self-explanatory and don't need to get into details.
We'll just make some tips about some of them.

PUID : This is the Person Unique Identifier Number or equivalent issue by a

specific country of region. It can be empty, but once is entered, is unique to the
person. The PUID is a key identifier of the individual. If there is a person that does
 not have a local PUID, set the Alternative ID checkbox and enter the information
there.
Alternative IDs : When you enable this checkbox, you will be able to enter new IDs,
such as Passports, other countries SSNs, etc... The person can have multiple IDs,
and they should be registered whenever possible. For example, it will facilitate
contacting this person if she or he is from another country.For clarity sake, the
alternative IDs section is not shown unless the checkbox is set.
Unidentified : Check this box if the person has no ID at the moment of registration.
This can be the case of people that is brought to the health center in an accident
settings. Once we gather the information at a later time, we unset the checkbox
and enter the ID.
Domiciliary Unit : This is a relational field that points to the place where the
person lives. This is the main person address and should not be confused with the
addresses of their relatives acquaintances that we will describe next.

Contact Information

Click on the next tab ("General") to enter the

information this person contact information. The
address can be associated to a person or an institution.
For example, we are showing the address of "Caro
Forte", she is Ana Betz Kenpo Karate teacher, with the
address of the Kenpo Karate school. Since the contact
is associated to a physical person (relational field), you
could easily get her teacher information opening the GNU Health person contact
resource. This section also contains the contact information
mechanisms of the person, such as email or phone
number.

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This page was last edited on 30 August 2016, at 22:20.

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