prospective-intake-pack.md

OpenScar Prospective Intake Pack

This pack translates the OpenScar six-table schema into a practical point-of-care capture workflow. It is intended for prospective scar and keloid registry pilots in plastic surgery clinics.

OpenScar does not diagnose, prescribe, select treatment, or replace clinician judgment. This pack only supports structured documentation, research preparation, and clinician-reviewed workflow design.

Purpose

The retrospective pilot kit answers whether historical records can be cleaned into the schema. The prospective intake pack answers a different question:

Can the clinic collect the right scar data from the beginning, before records become incomplete?

When to Use

Use this pack for:

• Baseline scar or keloid documentation.
• Follow-up visits after injection, laser, surgery, silicone, pressure therapy, radiotherapy, or observation.
• Internal registry pilots where governance approval already exists.
• De-identified research exports after clinical care documentation is complete.

Do not use it for:

• Patient-specific treatment recommendation.
• Autonomous recurrence prediction.
• Public release of identifiable images.
• Replacing consent, EHR documentation, or institutional review requirements.

Capture Workflow

1. Confirm governance and consent status.
2. Assign patient_id and lesion_id values.
3. Complete the clinician intake form.
4. Complete the patient symptom questionnaire.
5. Capture scar photos using the photo checklist.
6. Enter rows into the six-table schema.
7. Run data dictionary and template validators.
8. Keep any re-identification key outside this repository.

Pack Components

• Clinician Intake Form: structured baseline and follow-up capture for lesion, visit, treatment, and outcome fields.
• Patient Symptom Questionnaire: patient-reported pain, itch, satisfaction, functional impact, and cosmetic concern fields.
• Photo Capture Checklist: standardized image capture and quality-control checklist for ScarPhoto.
• OpenScar Data Dictionary: field-level dictionary for REDCap, Excel, or internal registry setup.

Minimum Prospective Visit Unit

Each baseline visit should aim to create:

• One patient row.
• One or more lesion rows.
• One visit row.
• One or more image rows if photo capture is allowed.
• Zero or more treatment rows depending on care delivered.
• One future outcome row once follow-up occurs.

Each follow-up visit should aim to create:

• One visit row.
• One or more image rows when photo capture is allowed.
• Treatment rows when care is delivered.
• Outcome rows when response or recurrence can be assessed.

Quality Rules

• Use date offsets for research exports.
• Use controlled vocabulary whenever possible.
• Mark missing values explicitly rather than inferring from silence.
• Separate patient-reported symptoms from clinician assessment.
• Treat image quality as metadata rather than as a cosmetic judgment.
• Review privacy status before any image pointer is exported.

First Clinic Pilot

Start with 10 prospective cases before scaling:

1. Test whether the forms fit normal clinic flow.
2. Measure how long capture takes.
3. Identify fields that patients or clinicians frequently skip.
4. Confirm that every captured field maps to the current six-table schema.
5. Decide whether a REDCap or EHR-integrated version is worth building.