Suboptimal handling of additional allergies

[jacobcuison]

Problem

When editing ALLERGY, existing allergies are overwritten.

I believe this goes against the goal of enabling "convenience" in editing patient records as seen in the UG (screenshot below). For instance, if a patient has 10 allergies, a doctor will have to type out all 10 existing allergies before they can specify a new allergy to be recorded. This could be very time-consuming for doctors.

[nus-se-script]

Team's Response

While valid, we believe that this would be a rare case of the doctor having to input that many allergies. Hence, we chose to respond with NotInScope as we believe that this can still be a possible future implementation but is of lower priority than work we have done in v1.4.

Items for the Tester to Verify

:question: Issue response

Team chose [response.NotInScope]

• [x] I disagree

Reason for disagreement: Thank you for your response team! However, I think this is still within the scope of v1.4.

My initial example of a patient with 10 allergies was indeed an extreme case to highlight the inconvenience of the current implementation, but this flaw still remains if a patient has fewer allergies.

For instance, let us consider a patient who is allergic to Seafood and Peanuts, and has discovered a new allergy to Dust.

In this current implementation, a doctor will still have to input editpatient 1 al/Seafood al/Peanuts al/Dust, which is still quite cumbersome and inconvenient. This goes against the value proposition of being a streamlined patient management app.

Furthermore, due to the design where initial allergies are overwritten, if a doctor who is under high stress simply forgets to type in one allergy (i.e. they only type editpatient 1 al/Peanuts al/Dust and exclude Seafood accidentally), this could be quite a big concern as the missing allergy would not be discovered immediately since the app does not give any warning that the allergies are overwritten. However, this may not to be a common occurence, which is why I believe it could just be classified as severity.Low.

Another implementation to consider could just be implementing an addallergy command, which would circumvent the iffy behaviour of overwriting existing allergies.

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