Mandatory fields vs. mandatory modules

You have the ability to make certain fields mandatory in your HIFIS 4 installation. However, we want to make it abundantly clear from the start that just because a field is mandatory does not necessarily mean you'll have data from that field for all clients.

What do we mean by that? Let's use an example.

Hypothetically, you might want your client's Contributing Factors to be mandatory. You want to know each client's current Contributing Factors and also some notes about it. So you go through the steps you learn this week and make various fields in the Contributing Factors module mandatory.

However, there's generally nothing forcing a user to add a new record. So while you could say something like "when a user adds a Contributing Factor record, they must include some Comments about it," but you can't say something like "when a user adds a new Client, they must also add at least one Contributing Factor." In other words, you can't make a module mandatory, but you can make fields within a module mandatory.

Tip: Generally speaking, communities will work around this limitation in the following ways: creating clear policies and documents telling staff what is expected of them; and disabling a lot of unnecessary fields and modules to reduce clutter and confusion.

One more note about mandatory fields: there may be times when the actual answer should be blank. For example, you can make the Emergency Services field mandatory on the Incidents module. That means that you have to specify which emergency services responded to the incident. But what if the answer is legitimately that none of them were involved - say, someone cut themselves and got a band-aid from the first aid kit? Consider these situations when thinking about what fields to make mandatory. One solution is to first customize the Look-Up Table and add a "None" option before making the field mandatory.