GNU Health/Health Professionals

The Health Professional Concept

The health professional is one of GNU Health's key components: It's used in appointments, patient evaluation, surgeries, lab tests, etc. This is why it is important to have them defined in your system before hand.

The health professional is a general concept: It covers physicians, nurses, biochemists, psychologists, and any other occupation related to health sciences.

Creating and Editing Health Professionals

Adding a new health professional

To define or edit a new Health Professional, follow this path: Health → Health Professionals

The Main steps involved in defining a Health Professional are:

1. Select (or create) the related party
2. Associate an internal user (login user) to the party
3. Define the health professional list of specialties
4. Set the default or main specialty

Party associated to a Health Professional

The health professional is a party with specific attributes, but is always a party. This abstract concept of party allow us to be different entities at the same time. For example, a health professional can also be a patient; both entities sharing the property of being a person. The party concept provides versatility and simplicity to GNU Health.

Party associated to a Health Professional

When you create the associated party from the Health Professional form, the Person and Health professional attributes will be automatically set. At this point, you need to enter the Health Professional demographics, in the same way as you have done when creating an individual. You might want to refresh the idea by glancing over the Individuals section.

Associating the login user to a health professonal in GNU Health

The Internal User field

The Individual, when assigned the property of being a Health Professional, it has an extra - and required - field. The "Internal User" field. This internal user is the user that the individual types in then logging into GNU Health. That user allows to digitally sign documents, and to audit their actions.

Once you are done with the party, save the party record ( Ctrl + S ).

Assigning a Main Specialty to the health professional from the list of this professional.

Health Professional specific fields

A health professional might have more than one specialty. In the Health Professional view, you can add all the specialties related to this particular professional. Once you are done, save the record ( Ctrl + S ). This is important so the system links the party with the health professional record.

Finally, add the information related to the professional:

• Institution
• Practitioner ID
• Main Specialty
• Extra information

Although these fields are not formally required, they are very important and should be entered in the system. Each health professional must have these fields filled in whenever possible. For instance, the Main Specialty field will be used as a default value whenever the doctor is assigned an appointment, or when creating a new evaluation.