Background; skip the next two paragraphs to get to the actual question…
I recently had to contact a lot of extended family to gather some health information, and many of those had to dig up records and contact others and so on. One asked if I would then share the compiled information with the others, in case others in the family had to look up similar information in future.
I did that of course but since then I’ve been thinking it would be good to have a proper collaborative family tree with them all, and I came across Gramps Web.
I wasn’t able to find information in the manual or in web searches about whether Gramps Web supports recording medical details along with each person entry, in a way that (often non technical) editors would find easy to use. I also wasn’t able to conclusively say one way or the other while playing with the demo app.
It might be useful to record any hereditary conditions, as well as cause of death.
Furthermore, it would then not be of all that much use unless that information searchable and/or filterable in a useful way.
I don’t think the question is Gramps Web specific - in Gramps (on whatever platform), in my opinion, events are the right thing to track that. There is a built-in “Medical Information” event type exactly for this purpose. And of course the “Cause Of Death” event type for fatal illness. Alternatively, you could use attributes, but they don’t have time information, so I think they are less suited.
Since the question was about sharing the information, it seemed like Gramps Webfor servers is the only real option. It is easy enough to store the data in Grampsfor Desktops. But we’d need to cobble together some reports (or use something like the SuperTool addon) to make it truly useful.
The ‘lack of a specific Report’ issue seemed like it would be the gating factor for Gramps Web. And it was unclear if building reports and using custom attributes was as ‘doable’ in Gramps Web.
When I first read the post I thought of the ToDo gramplet and creating a Medical Info sister app. Each person could have a Medical Info note that could be aggregated by the app like ToDo does.
A report for a base person could go back into the base person’s ancestry like the Ahnentafel report listing the ancestor, birth, death and their Med Info note. Maybe each generation should also include the GP’s siblings and their notes.
I was think that an ICD code addon gramplet might be a good approach. That would ensure statistics would be more easily collated. And Gramps would be able to display plain english rather than the codes.
I’m not so sure about “event". I think in a lot of cases we wouldn’t know exactly what date (or even necessarily what year) things were diagnosed.
I was hoping for something more general, even just a text field for the purpose that can be filled in. Example content could be as simple as “Huntington’s disease”, not really mattering when exactly they had it, just that they had it.
Then being able to highlight entries in a family tree based on a search term, like search “medical:cancer” and have anybody with “cancer” anywhere in their “medical history” field highlight so you can see where they are in your ancestry.
Like I said, you can use attributes instead, if you just want to track a property of the person with no date information.
Although I, personally, would still prefer a “Medical Information” event without a date - the date can be left empty and optionally added later. It’s not uncommon in Gramps to have events without dates, such as the “Religion” event.
There is no built-in attribute type for medical information, but you can easily add your own custom one, or even multiple ones.
Thanks. If you can leave it empty that changes things.
Then being able to highlight entries in a family tree based on a search term, like search “medical:cancer” and have anybody with “cancer” anywhere in their “medical history” field highlight so you can see where they are in your ancestry.
In Gramps Web, you would be able to do a full-text search for medical cancer (optionally filtering to only show person objects) and it would show the individuals.
In Gramps Desktop, you could create a custom filter rule to filter the person list by people who have an event with this properties.
