Class steward is Orders/Observation
Interested committees Patient Care
The Consent class represents informed consents and all slimilar medico-legal transactions between the patient (or his legal guardian) and the provider. Examples are informed consent for surgical procedures, for clinical trials, advanced beneficiary notice, against medical advice decline from service, release of information agreement, etc.
The details of consents vary. Often an institution has a number of different consent forms for various kinds of purposes, that remind the physician about the topics to mention. Such forms also contain patient education material. In electronic medical record communication consents thus are information entities on their own and need to be managed similar to medical activities. Thus, consents are modeled as a special class of Services.
The “signatures” to the consent document are represented electronically through Actor instances to the consent object. Typically an informed consent has actors of type performer (the physician informing the patient, and consenter, the patient or legal guardian. Some consents may associate a witness or a notary public (e.g., living wills, advanced directives.) In consents where a physician is not required (e.g. living will,) the performer may be the patient himself or a notary public.
Some consents have a minimal required delay between the consent and the service, so as to allow the patient to rethink his decisions. This minimal delay can be expressed in the service definition by the service_relationship.pause_qty attribute that delays the service until the pause time has elapsed after the consent has been completed.