Bert,
Just a quick preview from the meeting with Jon earlier this week. (More info later this weekend.. I know, but between the meetings, the drive back, then playing "catch up" after being out of the office for two days, I've been too tired to put a post together for the group)... there are changes coming for prescribing.
We discussed active vs inactive, and chronic vs episodic medications, and most likely there is going to be a way to separate these, and to expire episodic medications when they run out. (antibiotics for bronchitis, that sort of thing). That's in the planning stage.
THREE patches that he's accepting upstream from me for prescribing - the first is context sensitive medication instructions. Tablets say tablets. Capsules say capsules. If it's a topical, the directions are for topicals. Eye and ear meds have proper instructions, etc. This is done by parsing the medication name, looking for clues as to the drug type and route. While it may not ALWAYS be 100% right, I think the decision tree I use to parse this does a pretty good job - high 90's at least. The occasional mistake you type what you want, and it remains on your "hot list", so not that great a problem on the rare occasion it's wrong. The second one FINALLY fixes the bug where you don't see the current allergies, you see the allergies from the LAST SAVED CHART NOTE. The third patch to the meds passes the CHART NOTE DATE to the prescription form, not TODAY's date. If you're doing a catch-up note, it means that you won't screw up your history data if you forget to change the prescription date. Also, last Rx date was ALWAYS today's date, rather than the Rx date. Not a problem if the Rx has today's date, but otherwise was doing the math wrong. Based on my meeting with Jon on Tuesday where I reviewed patches with him, he likes these.
I think that the yellow line on the Rx form is a good place for putting in the reaction, etc, on a discontinued med. Would be cool if we could bring this up as a tool tip - show it by hovering the mouse over the med rather than having to click on it.. but I don't know how do-able this is. I'll look into it. Being able to say to the patient "Well, we tried you on X and you got hives, and Y gave you the screaming awfuls, lets try Z" would be pretty damn impressive!
Bert, when you switch back and forth, do you ever have to change the number of "twips" to shift the form? If the answer to this is "NO" then I think what you're asking is a pretty easy hack. I'd have to change the setup screen to be check boxes of what forms to allow, rather than radio buttons, then have the checked forms be radio buttons at print time. (I'd rather NOT have EVERY form be available EVERY time you print - would be a BIG pop-up ! Let me think about the best approach to this one for a couple days. Would be handy, and I think pretty easy to bang out.
Gang, it's been an exhausting week. I'll try VERY HARD to write up more about what happened this week.. to keep your interest here's a little teaser :-) we discussed the design of practice management, billing and insurance verification, more patches, a new template management system with Treeview controls and drag-and-drop to organized your template collection, and lots of other goodies. We also had fun updating the board with the new version of UBBthreads, and the new WIKI for creating a decent Amazing Charts user guide / help section.
Be well, folks.. more soon.
V.
