4 Must-Do’s

1. Problem Description: Have you clearly defined the user problem(s) you intend to solve, and what value this creates? Write down a story, user insight, or quote about this problem (this is important because (1) this will motivate your team, and (2) without this your problem might not actually be a big problem for the users themselves).

2. User Stories: Have you clearly written at least 3 user stories and use cases?

3. Market Analysis: Have you surveyed what the market is doing here (e.g. comparison to other EMRs, or paper approaches; and don’t forget about learning from historic/existing OMRS instances)? Have you written down any possible gaps in your understanding of your users or their workflows? Have you reviewed the topic in FHIR to see what requirements or fields the global community references? (Eg if working on insurance, should look here)

4. Technical Considerations & Dependencies: Have you outlined what you need from cross-functional areas for success of the feature? E.g. do you need the platform to support a new API call? Have you explained how you’ve addressed dev concerns, such as designs that may not be feasible, or will be extra time-intensive to implement?

Optional/Encouraged

Sketches: Have you added a drawing or description of how the feature could work to solve the problem at hand? (Pictures of sketches are ok!)

Project Management: Have you created the Epic and JIRA tasks so you can share work clearly? Roll-out plan: Do you have an idea whether this will be an experiment, gradual roll out, and when? Have you added this to the timeline view? Have you planned how you will promote and/or work with communications folks in order to help this feature reach the widest audience and have the biggest impact it can?

Later but should do

QA Plan: Have you mentioned the plan for QA, such as how you will discover and address edge cases? Does your team/squad have a plan for automated tests to be added to new components (unit tests) or workflows (e2e tests)?

Safety & Tech Risks: Is there any reason you could regret rolling out this feature? (e.g. possible patient harm, heavy tech debt like introducing an unsupported library) Have you thought through the risks for this particular solution? And, how to reduce/address those?

This checklist was inspired by this article. Additional Business Analyst Resources here.

Status: In Progress

Technical Complexity: Easy

Summary:

When clinicians are ordering a drug for a patient, allergies should be shown visually, so that clinicians do not forget an important allergy and order a drug that could cause patient harm.

1. Problem & User Stories

Providers are often extremely busy, and when ordering drugs, it is surprisingly easy for a provider to forget about a patient’s allergies.
- We have even seen providers order a medication for a patient only minutes after writing down that the patient was allergic to that very same medication!
In order to help prevent ordering of medicines that people are allergic to, a simple way is to display the patient’s allergies in the same space/time that the clinician is making a drug order.
Eventually, we will want more advanced Clinical Decision Support - such as preventing a provider from ordering a related drug. In the meantime, this UI display feature is a simple way to help reduce the risk of allergies being forgotten.

2. Designs

Tablet:

Desktop:

In desktop, the header is visible, so the patient name/age details are not needed in the workspace.

However, the allergies should still be shown in the workspace.

Slides where mockups were done: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PlKxBWMxHGKiv6QKZAU2s6jX0zrLd4levDRc0kuCikY/edit?usp=sharing

Technical Considerations & Dependencies

Leverage the allergy api, such as: https://rest.openmrs.org/#list-allergy-subresources

Future Considerations (Out of Scope for v1)

Color Considerations: We may want to consider changing the color of the tags based on the severity of the allergy (e.g. yellow = mild, orange = moderate, red = severe).

Other Areas: There are other areas where allergies should be considered, such as in Medical Supply Orders.

While drugs are the main concern, some medical supplies should also consider allergies. Such as;
- Equipment orders for IV tubing or gloves or would supplies, where the patient has a latex allergy.
  - Latex allergy prevalence is up to 1 in 20 normal people, and up to 1 in 5 in healthcare staff: The prevalence in the general population has been reported to range between 1% and 6%. In Healthcare Workers, it’s similar or up to 20%. Source