(to be filled in by Mark Tucker and Suranga Nath Kasthurirathne).
Issue no. 01:
Ability to assign identifiers to encounters and observations.
Currently, the only unique identifiers for encounters are their uuid and their id, which are assigned by the system. We require an additional set of identifiers to be able to identify individual encounters and observations externally.
1) Adding a new column to these tables is not a good solution, as the obs table is already quite large. Furthermore, adding a new column would also require indexing etc.
2) Alternatively, the identifier for an encounter may be persisted as an obs created under that encounter. However, this doesn't necessarily make it easy to search for.
3) The accession number can be considered as an external identifier used to identify grouped observations. This could probably be used to build some kind of a hack, but it couldnt be considered as a concrete solution.
4) Encounter Attributes and Obs Attributes may be the most suitable option, we have talked of implementing this for OpenMRS previously, but never really got around to doing it.