The XrayNotes Event Database

While designing the XrayNotes database great care has been taken to design a database that captures the medical reality as close as possible while maintaining security and privacy and robustness. One of the main innovations in XrayNotes the ability to capture medical events. A medical event is something that happened to the patient in the course of patients seeking help or getting treatment. For example, one of the first events that a patient will encounter is the 'New Patient' event. The patient then, can receive or register several more events where his/her basic biometrics are entered, an appointment is registered or symptoms and complaints are noted. Diagnostic is also an event. Procedures are also  entered as an event. In fact, almost everything that happened  in the course of treating the patient, may be registered as an event. XrayNotes will allow one to create any custom event that is suitable for representing what happened in the course of treating the patient. Naturally, XrayNotes has a full set of built-in events that is sufficient to describe every aspect of the treatment process from lab tests to surgeries to insurance claims.    Every patient data entry is tagged with a unique Patient ID, that unique ID is globally unique and will represent the data that is connected to that patient. An example of that unique ID is 'Q783-7FGL-730C-4941-F42C-46S2-26R7-DW6Q'. Also every event is tagged with a unique event ID,  again a globally unique, and specific to that patient and to that event. An example of an event ID would be: "Q783-7FGL-730C-496E-3B79-46S2-26R7-DW6Q"    At this point this unique ID is connectable to that patient only by the doctor or the hospital that generated that ID. Because only the treating doctor (or entity) can connect the patient ID to the name, it is safe to share medical detail and every event on an open global network. Because the patient identity cannot be backtraced from the unique number, medical data can freely flow and can be freely accessible  for research, education and science.   These set of events contain great power. Particularly, the events allow real-life actions to be captured as they happen. Because in reality one cannot undo anything in the past, the events should also be treated like they cannot be changed. If one needs to correct something, just like in real life we create the correction event to undo the error, or rather to correct the error. Because anything that happened in the past is treated as a read only entity, event queues and events from different locations can be merged into one master queue, allowing medical professionals to have a complete overview of a set of  events that happened.  Grouping of events. The same patient may seek help for multiple unrelated cases at multiple different times. XrayNotes allows an event to point to a parent event, whereby specifying grouping of events that belonged to the same case. The root event of one particular case will have no parent event.  The Patient Resource Locator. This special locator is designed to allow any qualified medical professional to find a person's emergency medical information with minimal effort and minimal data input. The patient resource locator is assembled from the following information: birth location birth date, birth name. For example the following PRL was created from a hypothetical patient who was born in Sarasota in 1959 November 20, and was called 'Test Patient': PRL://US_FL_SARASOTA_1959_11_20_TEST_PATIENT  This combination of birth locale, and birth name also creates a globally unique ID, whereby it is unrealistic to expect the same name person to be born at the same location at the same time. Even if the twins they are named differently. The Xraynoes event data may be accessed by two main methods: Patient Resource Locator or patient's unique ID. 1. The patient resource locator only contains emergency related information, and the doctor and the patient has complete power over which events to mark as visible under the patient resource locator. If the doctor/patient does not find suitable events to mark for public visibility they can create an event specially tailored to be visible by the patient resource locator. 2. The globally unique ID allows all patient data to be visible. The only exception whether patient requests complete (or partial) privacy of his or her events in which case XrayNotes will not publish any of the event details on the global network. Ordinarily, the XrayNotes data, accessed by the patient's unique ID contains all medical event data. Because the patient ID is globally unique and non-translatable into the original patient's name, the access to that data needs not be restricted or controlled or encrypted. However if one suspects that the patient's unique IDs compromised a new unique ID can be created. When a new unique ID is created, the patient or doctor or administrator who is creating the new unique ID is responsible to propagate events onto the new unique ID. This should happen only in extreme cases, and the XrayNotes program will greatly assist in the transition.