First of all, I am not Chuck Norris. I can be Sergey Brin if you want. For those of you who do not know who Mr. Brin is, he along with Larry Page, founded Google.
Now for the data and inactive and active. Let's see:
Let's search for hematuria. Ahh...one patient. Not many urine dips in peds. Let's make him inactive and search again. Hmm, still one patient with hematuria. I guess it doesn't affect diagnoses.
How about medications. Let's search for itraconazole. OK. Eight patients with the antifungal. Let's make three of them inactive. Search again: Hmmm, still eight patients with itraconazole. And, the same patients, too.
Now, let's go to financials. Today I brought in $1938. (Fictitious figure). Let's make everybody inactive! Do the financials again. Still the same figure.
When you click on the little radio BUTTON (wow! a button), a little check mark goes into the column marked inactive in the demographics. This filters out that name and it doesn't show up in the patient list anymore. But, I would seriously doubt that that table would relate to the other tables in such a way as to change the data. In fact, you could most likely delete that entire patient in AC in the demographics table and the table with the messages and the table with the notes would most likely still be there. That's the whole idea of a relational database. Wow, it may get even tougher with SQL Server Express.
How do I know these things? Because I am Sergey Brin. I doubt that a singer from Nashville or Wayne Gretzky could do it. It really only takes trial and error.
I work a lot on workarounds, because I hear what users are saying and, knowing that a magic button is not going to appear, I find ways to help them. You know, like Vista's greatest workaround where you can install the Vista Upgrade (what about $125 cheaper than the full version) and install it CLEANLY on a virgin hard drive WITHOUT any OS. Very cool. I didn't come up with this. Or, I figure out how to get rid of the double login and the firewall from hell.
These ideas are really good. And, who knows, maybe Jonathan or Vinny or I (if I had access to the code) may write them in sometime. But, it isn't just as easy as adding a button. See, for every one person who wants a database button, there are 500 other users wanting something else. You can't simply add things willy nilly. A program has to evolve with a plan. When was the last time you wrote to Microsoft and asked them to change Office 2003? Didn't matter. They didn't change it for four years.
So, I will go by Bert, peruse through the rest of the boards seeing if I can learn something or add something and then get back to my interesting paperwork.
Oh, and you don't HAVE to do the workarounds
