Steve,

You can have more than one window open at a time.

I have a similar idea going in my current accounting app - a "dashboard" that lets you choose a month to work on and tells you the status of the processing of that month's data. I thought it important to make it plain to the user at all times what was being worked on and whether it was ready to proceed to the next step in the processing, so I have a month chooser (spinner) and a series of traffic lights that change from stop to go.

Also, everything is in the same datasession so the user is never working on more than one month at a time, though she can change from month to month in one sitting.

It sounds like you would have the user choose a patient from your banner form but then everything else on the screen must be related to that particular patient. (Look up labs, enter notes, print invoice, post payments.)

I guess the other approach would be to choose a function (post payments) and then choose a patient, but you would have to ask your customers how they usually do their work. Someone looking up labs would want things to be patient oriented, but someone posting all the payments for the day would want things to be task oriented.




>I want to have a banner-size control panel in a window of its own above each patient form window that contains patient information inside the banner plus some command buttons that allow me to go to assorted patient apps from the control panel banner.
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>Would I change all of my existing patient forms and add a banner at the top of each form that looks like a separate window? Or can I have two forms on screen at the same time? Or is there another way that I don't know about to do this?
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>Thanks for your ideas. I am not sure of the best way to design this. I should also mention that the app starts out on a master screen form where common patient information is entered prior to selecting a certain patient app where a subset of the patient information would appear in the banner at the top of each patient app as described above.