Procedure Edit Window - Refresh needed

[atd]

We've added another clinic to Open Dental and have a lot of new users on the system. An old issue I forgot about has come up again, which I'm hoping is an easy fix.

Our assistants will often start the SOAP notes for the appointment and then the dentist will edit/sign them afterwards. We have a few extra computers setup in our dentists office for them to use to catch up on tasks and do notes between patients. We had an the following issue today:
- The assistant was entering the notes for a patient on computer A.
- The dentist was entering a lab case for the same patient on computer B.
- Since the chart was already open on computer B, when she opened the Procedure Edit window to enter notes, it didn't show the notes the assistant had already done because the screen doesn't automatically refresh.
- Her notes were then considered newer by the computer and the notes the assistant had entered were overwritten (still visible in the audit trail).

To prevent this from happening, couldn't the procedure edit window load the most recent version of the notes, rather than what's cached in the chart on that computer?

[jordansparks]

OK, I added it to the bug list because I agree that it's important. But I would also be surprised if it didn't pull from the db, so for now, I have it listed as unconfirmed. We will have to examine the code to see exactly what happens.

[drtech]

similar issue we have had is when saving notes on an appointment...when two people are editing at the same time one gets overwritten. This happens fairly frequently in our office... I think this could be solved by reloading the note from the database when clicking the OK button to compare with what was loaded when opening. If it is different from what was already there (someone else has edited the note since you opened it) then parsing together what is currently in the window (2nd user edits) and what was just saved to the database (1st user edits).

[Ryan]

We took a look at the code and it looks like every time the procedure edit window is launched the notes are pulled directly from the database. Is there a series of steps that we can take that will guarantee that this issue will be recreated? This might be happening because the procedure notes have not been saved to the database yet. The notes are not saved to the database until the technician clicks OK in the procedure edit window. One possible recreation:
-Assistant working on computer A edits the procedure notes.
-Dentist working on computer B opens the same procedure and starts editing the notes before the assistant closes the procedure edit window by clicking OK.
-The assistant clicks OK.
-The Dentist clicks OK.
--In this scenario the assistant would only see the notes they wrote, and the dentist would only see the notes they wrote until the module is refreshed. Once the module is refreshed both the assistant and the dentist will see the dentist's notes because the dentist was the last one to save.

From the online manual:
"The procedure note field is one of the most important fields in the database, so it perfectly preserves all historical versions. It's impossible to have a concurrency issue with procedure notes because no rows are ever changed. Subsequent changes to a note are stored as entirely new rows, and all historical versions of a note can be viewed using the audit mode in the Chart module. "

The complete concurrency page can be found at :
http://opendental.com/manual/refreshing.html

[atd]

It looks like that is what must be happening - they both have the same procedure edit window open at the same time.
When I go to save a task that has been modified by another user I get a warning message that changes have been made by someone else. Could something similar be done with the procedure notes?

[jordansparks]

Oh, that's right. We also have a strategy in place in other parts of the program that shows the user both versions of a note and lets the user pick which version they like, including a concatenation of both versions. So, yes, there are certainly some things we can do there.