Facilitated Management of Serial numbers

Collection instruction

The "Add Patient with Serial Helper" button on the Patient List launches a form that lets the collector pick a Service/Location, and that proposes the next sequential Serial number for that laptop based on any current or recently deleted records on the laptop.

If no previous entry, the number used for a new laptop identifier as per Serial_number#Special-Use_Serial_Numbers will be used.

Background

Data collectors used to collect one or more locations from one or more pools of serial number pools. All laptops now use one pool of serial numbers per Service/Location.

Details of the serial number system are located in Serial number. This has been flagged as one reason why people find paper printouts of the most recent patients sent useful. The need to keep track of this is one reason given by collectors to keep using the Data collection log form. We would like to eliminate reasons for this additional paperwork.

Before Update of D ID to include a laptop identifiers, Serial numbers had to be unique for a collection location, so if a ward like HSC_H4H is collected on by multiple collectors then a serial number must never be re-used. This is currently achieved by assigning blocks of numbers for each 100 possible serial numbers to a given collector (again, see Serial number for details).

A serial number must be entered before any other data since access uses it to set the relationships for the data. To accomplish that, function new_pat_id() opens a window requesting the serial number pops up when "add new patient" is clicked on the patient list.

Potential problems moving to one pool per laptop for all?

Not a problem: large Serials will increase size of D_ID

D_ID is currently limited to 18 characters. The only unit who has 18 right now is HSC_WRS3; the laptop is at 14600ish. The highest local serial is 40500ish for STB_ACCU. It will be a long time before these roll over to 10000. This should not be a problem.

Not a problem: Negative and presumably decreasing serials There is a temporary situation of HSC_WRS3 using negative serial numbers. This is not the usual thing, this was done initially to solve the duplicate records (i.e. before and after covid) but after changing the process, the positive serial number sequence has been followed. No new negative serials are expected, so not a problem. If we needed to use negative numbers again in the future we could, they just wouldn't be managed automatically.