Bert,
I agree with your suggestions to clean up the messages portion of AC. In a way I hate to make the comparison, but this is like the letter writer; as it stands, it is functional but could be much improved with a few (simple?) upgrades.
1. Get rid of extra "re:'s": Agreed.
2. Make names consistent: Messages about the same patient show up as "Chart: Donald Duck (03/20/2005)" and "(Patient: D. Duck)". Make the format consistent. "Last name, first name (birthdate)" would likely be best- see #4 below for why.
3. Delete the word "patient": The real redundancy is that it also puts this type of message in parentheses. So either get rid of the word "patient" or the parentheses.
4. "Ironically, you can sort by From and by Date, but not by the most important field, which is Patient name." Well you actually can sort by patient name; if you sort by "subject" it does this, but it sorts them by first name (or first initial). If the format for both patient messages and charts was "Last name, first name", then they would sort alphabetically by last name.
