`edit` allow editting doctor to have duplicate phone number with other

[nus-pe-bot]

Here Doctor Xvier charles and Doctor RonaldPeterParkerLee has same phone number, which is an obvious anomaly

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_{[original: nus-cs2103-AY2425S1/pe-interim#1425] [original labels: severity.Medium type.FeatureFlaw]}

[aldentantan]

Team's Response

The primary purpose of the app is to manage patient information, not to centralize and manage shared contact details like those of doctors. The inability to propagate updates for shared doctors does not impair the app's ability to manage patient records or fulfill its main function.

The simplest design, which is the app's current design, would be to treat each patient record as self-contained, with doctor details directly associated with individual patients. Having doctors as a separate entity and adding the functionality to link doctors and patients instead adds significant additional complexity and requires significant effort given that it would likely introduce additional dependencies and potential synchronization issues, hence would be an extension for future versions so we are classifying it as not in scope.

We acknowledge manually editing the doctor’s details for multiple patients under them would be tedious. However, we decided to leave the current design as such to keep it flexible and avoid unnecessary restrictions for the following reasons:

1. Nursing homes often prioritize personalized care, and it is common for each patient to have their own attending doctor based on their specific medical needs, conditions, or preferences. Patients may have unique specialists for various conditions (e.g., cardiologists, neurologists) or general practitioners assigned based on availability and specific health plans, making overlap in doctors less likely. Given that only few patients would have overlapping doctors, this makes it merely a "minor inconvenience".

2. While doctors often care for multiple patients, scenarios where the same doctor is assigned to numerous patients and changes contact details frequently are relatively rare. For example, phone number or email changes are uncommon and would only affect a small subset of users. Hence, this would be "unlikely to affect normal operations of the product", which is primarily to manage patient information and would only "appear in very rare situations" where a doctor changes contact details.

3. Allowing independent doctor details for each patient gives users flexibility to input slight variations in doctor information (e.g., different phone numbers for different clinics/departments the doctor is attached to, same doctor using multiple emails specific to the clinics/departments), which might otherwise be restricted if records were linked.

As such, editing multiple records manually, while time-consuming, ensures the user has control over the accuracy of each patient's information. Automating changes might unintentionally affect unrelated records(e.g. similarly named but different doctors) if not implemented with proper safeguards. The current design avoids these pitfalls by isolating records, hence we are classifying this as low severity.

Duplicate status (if any):

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