Clinical Forms and reporting

Introduction
EMMA features a highly sophisticated form processing system which is tightly integrated into all aspects of the system.
This system allows you to gather data from the patient in a clinical setting and then aggregate and report on it in an easy to use manner.

We have chosen not to design a complete clinical system, but instead have designed and built the tools for you to easily build and use your own.

Features
The system is both doctor and patient facing and is built around the concept of forms, questions and reports.

Questions
A question is exactly what it sounds like - a question and a response. You can choose the text of the question and the format of the response, be it "Yes/No", Multiple choice, Freetext (both long or short) or anything else. You can then also specify units of measurements as well as a box for notes if needed.
Questions are uniquely linked in the system so you are only ever asked the same question once within a validity period defined for each question.
IE: if you are asked your blood pressure, that may only be valid at that moment, but if you are asked your date of birth, that would be valid for ever - so the system would know that you had already answered that question and preinsert your previous response to it if you were asked it again.


Forms
Forms are collections of questions that are built into sections. You can have patient facing forms and doctor facing forms but crucially these may share the same questions allowing you to have patients fill in forms before their appointments, then the system will automatically fill in those responses to the relevant questions on the doctor's form(s) saving the doctor the bother of retyping the response.
This saves the doctor time and also improves interaction with the patient as the doctor and the patient are both reading from the same page.

Forms can be automatically linked to appointments so that the patient can fill them in, but equally doctors can add in further forms if needed to allow them to take the appointment in any direction they like.

Forms contain a complete audit trail of all previous responses to any question (irrespective of whether that question was asked on that form or another one) and  this ensures that both patients and clinicians have the best possible picture of the responses given by the patient.


Reporting
All data gathered in forms is recorded in the database and may be pulled out at any time. All units are recorded and data can be sent either into a Clinical report or straight into Excel for reporting.

Clinical Reports
Perhaps the most sophisticated part of the process is the Clinical Reports module that is integrated into the forms system.
Clinical reports not only allow you to summarise the information enter in the forms and question responses in a neat and easy to read PDF, but also allow you to integrate logic and standardised text along with patient specific information, often entered by the doctor or medical secretary.
For example:
You may have set up a question called Blood pressure. The forms system will gather the response to this question and record it.
The reporting system then not only presents the answer recorded, but also follows an instruction that if the number recorded is above a certain limit, then a standard element of text is to be presented alongside it.
This simple decision tree is tied into every question-response allowing the reporting module to actually insert clinically relevant information depending on the response given.
Because the entire system is completely customisable, it may be used not only for clinical information, but lifestyle information, demographics or any number of other kinds of information that you can define yourselves.