We are a hospital with many of our clinical systems designed in Lotus Notes, such as wheelchair prescriptions, home-care instructions, patient lists, etc. One of the pieces of data that is very important to us is the discharge date (D/C date).
Our problem is that the D/C date is reflected in quite a few databases, but is only pulled from the “main” database upon creation of the form. Thus, if a case manager changes the D/C date for the patient, the other forms already created won’t reflect the change.
Can anyone think of a way to share field data between databases that would allow real-time viewing of the data? We’ve considered using computed text fields to do @DBLookups to the document holding the D/C date, which would probably work, but I was hoping for a more “built-in” solution such as a data connection resource or shared field concept.
Any ideas would be most appreciated.
Subject: Sharing field data between databases
Nothing much more ‘built in’ than a DbLookup 
If you only need to see the data, this is a fine solution - easy to code up, it’s fast, and it works. I could argue that this kind of solution does a nice job of approximating what happens in a relational db where you join tables - the data lives one place, you pull it together to make it look like it’s all really one big pile via the join.
If you need the subsidiary docs to actually have the data in a field, you’ll probably need to write code in the D/C db that finds all the appropriate dbs and docs and updates the data any time the date is changed. You’d need a view (make it the same name to save youreself some grief) in each subsidiary db that has an appropriate key so you can easily find a doc based on the key (patient ID comes to mind). Your D/C db will need a list of pointers to all of the subsidiary dbs.
If you’re only talking about a few dbs, this isn’t a huge pain to do.
Get pointer
Open db
Get view
Get doc based on key
Update the D/C date
Next pointer
If you want to spend money, the LEI solution might be the way to go. I think you can link Notes dbs together (think, don’t use it so you might want to check in the Lotus Enterprise Integration forum)
HTH
Doug
Subject: RE: Sharing field data between databases
Actually, we use LEI to do some other data replication from our AS/400 servers and pushes to some SQL databases as well. I can look into trying to maintain a list of sources.
Currently, I’m using the @DBLookup to take care of this and it’s working well. I’m considering the idea you presented about having the PHCI do a broadcast change to all related databases whenever the D/C date changes. It’d be a bit of a pain, especially taking into account security access, but it would at least give us a central place to find all places where a change would take effect.
Thanks for the feedback!
Subject: Sharing field data between databases
The difficulty here, without some sort of back-end, LEI solution, would be to update all documents up the write of a change.