I am having a problem with medicine units when entering prescriptions. The size field in the database is set to be a float, but many medicines are not formulated in that fashion.
combined meds need to be entered as 7.5-500 for example. When I do this the medicine units is not saved (blank).
My drugs table is already populated with “Orange Book” data. All medicine names appear once, so I depend on entering the concentration of the medicine in the size field.
I’m not sure if this change is from a patch, but I noticed it after patch 6. I changed it to varchar, but will I need to keep changing with each patch?
You should be safe, since I don’t think this field will every be changed in upgrade/patch. That being said, you could always search for this column label in the pertinent sql/sql_*_… or sql/patch.sql files to ensure it does not get modified.
Sounds like it may make sense to do this for the official codebase anyways. Any sql gurus see a problem with converting a float field to a varchar field (for example, in an upgrade script, this may be converting thousands of real data entries, so do not want to corrupt them).
I don’t think so. the opposite would pose a problem.
the question is: is the limitation (float) required for certification? If so, the my drug database would have to be just like that of allscripts. An impossible task.
varchar makes more sense. there are to many combination medicines. And more keep getting made.
I will check on that issue, we are ONLY certified with NewCrop so I can check on the required value when synchronization between OpenEMR and NewCrop happens. Let you know tomorrow.
-Tony