Question

We are implementing Plone as a document management system in a hospital setting.
In doing so, the review process asks for two review steps:

1. where nursing staff review a document
2. where physicians review a document

The problem arises when we found out that the nurses are grouped based on the types of machinery they handle (specifically types of scanners, ultrasound,…). On these machines they perform all kinds of exams, on all kinds of bodyparts.

The physicians on the other hand are grouped based on bodyparts expertise.

This means that a document that pertains to an ultrasound of the pelvis should be reviewed by the ultrasound group within the nursing population and the abdominal group within the physician population.

There are approximately 8 nursing groups and 7 physician groups which would account for 56 different workflows on 56 different document types… This looks like a maintance nightmare.

Is there a different way to “dynamically” assign reviewer groups based on parameters given to a document? If so, where are the parameters defined at the document type level and assigned at the document instance level?

Answer 1

There may be an easier way to approach this.

Plone workflows can be stacked; e.g. you can assign more than one workflow to a content type.

This means you can assign both a nurse and a doctor workflow, each handing out specific permissions. If you set up your roles correctly per workflow, your use-case should be easy to implement; just split Roles into those for nurses and doctors.

So, where a default workflow uses Reviewer, Editor, Contributor, Member, etc, use DoctorReviewer, NurseReviewer, DoctorEditor, NurseEditor, etc. That way the two workflows will handle two sets of parallel permissions, transitions and states.

I do not know enough about your use-cases if this will solve your problems at all, but I just wanted to make sure you knew about the option before exploring complex custom plugins.