I am a dialysis patient. I added a Treatment record for dialysis with a start date of 14 November 2017 - the date of my first acute dialysis - and no end date, because it is on-going on a regular schedule (in my case, every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, unless I need to shift the schedule or add an extra treatment for some reason). I expected that I would link every discreet dialysis Visit to that one Treatment record, since it is current and on-going. At the time, I did not know that Treatments show up on the Calendar, and that current on-going treatments show up on every date in the Calendar.
I can see why Treatments show up on the Calendar. There are treatments that are continuous through a period of time, and that do not require a Visit to a facility, so it can make sense for those to show up as a daily item in the Calendar. There are also treatments that recur on a periodic basis that do no occur daily, for which a daily entry on the Calendar would not be accurate. It also doesn't seem like it should be necessary to clutter the Treatment records with separate, otherwise identical Treatment records for each Visit.
Recurring Visits, on the other hand, do warrant separate Visit records for each Visit, because there may be things that happen during a Visit that differ from one Visit to the next, even for the same treatment. For example, I have a lab that is drawn during a dialysis visit that only happens on the first Thursday of the month. I have an iron sucrose injection that happens weekly on Thursdays, and an injection that normally happens every other Thursday, but sometimes happens on Tuesdays.
As another example, after my transplant, it was determined that the organ was positive for cytomegalovirus (CMV) while I was CMV negative, so I had to undergo 8 IV treatments over 4 weeks on Mondays and Thursdays, with each treatment being a two-hour visit to the transplant clinic.In this case, it wasn't an open-ended series of treatments like dialysis, having a definite beginning and ending point and a specified number of visits.
You know best how your data model supports Treatments and Visits. I suggest that, in order to accurately reflect recurring treatments that happen on an other than daily basis, Treatments need to support nth calendar day of the month (1st of every month), nth day of the week in the month (1st Thursday of the month, or 1st and 3rd Mondays of the month, etc.), weekly on particular days of the week (every Monday and Thursday), as well as daily.Not sure what would need to happen regarding dates. Recurring treatments could have a definite end date, like the CMV example, above, or could be until until the end of time, like dialysis.
- Tom
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