Please give us some time to ponder before removing this functionality.
There are at least three different issues:
- opening more than one patient at a time
- opening a given encounter/form in more than one instance at a time, by the same or multiple users
- ability to write to multiple forms at the same time.
In the “back office” I often have several instances open in different windows. Sometimes different browsers even. Maybe one is a billing issue I need to track down, another finish charting, another needing a letter to go out, another to take a peak at the next patient’s chart. So as an “admin”, I open multiple instances as I work.
Then I leave that machine and move to the exam room. As a “clinician” actually seeing a patient, I only open one chart - for the patient in that room. It is entirely possible that I will open the exact same encounter/exam form that is actively opened on another computer in the “back office”. In fact that is the typical scenario.
From a form perspective, the eye form only grants write privileges to one instance at a time, no matter what machine or browser you are working from. That is tracked in table “form_eye_locking”. Maybe you can create a similar, more object-oriented method for ownership/write privs for all forms? This would address the privileges at the form level (number 2. in the list above), but not the ability to open and write to more than one patient/form at a time. This would probably need to be tracked at the user level to prevent a user from just opening a different browser and having two charts opened also.