Home Forums Discussions Feedback and Recommendations Easier access to Past Med Hx data

Complex medical histories take much more room than provided on the base screen, requiring a lot of scrolling. I would love to have a "mouse hovering" feature. Instead of : CABG - 1999, 4 vessel bypass, EF-40% etc, you could just list: CABG - hover over the item, and it would expand in another smaller window. You could do this for allergies also. I use the "hovering" feature in my Excel documents - lab flow sheets that I import into "Imported Documents" to elaborate on what changes I made with abnormal labs.

My suspicion is that this would require "rich text format" (RTF) which AC does not currently have.

I was told it was somewhat involved to go to RTF. It would also allow bold and italics and such.

One of those lessor things that have kind of gone on hold with the major developments (V4 = SQL database, V5 = eprescribing and CHITT, ?V6 = PM ) I must admit, we have come quite a way from V1, but are still surprisingly similar, and very user friendly.

I always thought a separate box for Past Surgical History would be great - one of our docs just puts surgeries under PMHX and uses his problem list as their entire history (makes a lot of diagnoses on every chart) - I put Past Medical --list them all and then at bottom of box Past Surgical. I guess each of us have our own way - I would love to have had a separate box.

I agree about the need to have Surgical History easily visible and have been trying to use the Summary Page in place of my old " Summary of Care" sheet in the paper chart which had a section for Surgical History. Currently I am putting the Surgical History in as an "Alert" on the Summary Page and also enter the surgical history in the PMH of the encounter which, of course, carries forward. Works OK....The other choice would be to replace the Summary that is in AC now with an Excel spreadsheet, I have not done that yet because I think that keeping all the information within the AC program is "better" long-term than having information squirreled away in something that is not completely integrated.....I don't know. Any other ideas??

I know this isn't the response you want, but if you hit CTRL-e you will be given an expanded screen to work and read in.

(Just in case you haven't seen that yet.)

Please! I have made this same request several times. Come on,even med students know: cc: hpi, pmh, PSH, fm, sh, allergies, ROS, pe, a/p....

I have to put past medical/obstetrical/gynecological/surgical history all in one past medical box, it works fine but I also have younger reproductive age patients without a lot of medical problems.

I BOLDLY recommend getting rid of PMH/PSH completely in current form. Much better to CODIFY this info ala meds. ICD-9 would allow this. It would be a radical change, so I put it out here only for thoughts for now.

I thought about this, but wonder if there are ICD 9 codes for surgical history - eg tonsillectomy, appendectomy, exploratory laparotomy, etc

You have my vote for a separate medical and surgical history. What about just an option for separating them?

Thanks Benjamin, I haven't seen CTRL-e. That's a big help.

Something that might help in the meantime..
There was a separate thread that mentioned that you can create icd codes for things like surgeries and conditions that just can't be squeezed into an icd.