[Gnumed-devel] Phrase Wheel - a few comments

[richard terry]

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1 Substring matching is Section dependant and Editing Area Line Dependant
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Is Section dependant as we think differently in different sections:

e.g:

Prescription:

We don't think substrings, e.g if I want ranitidine, I dont type in 'tid', or 
if I want a brand I don't type in 'xil' for Amoxil. Yet on the line with 
Prescribed For we do thing in instrings to bring up a term (though of course 
the system 'learns' our habits and auto-fills this most of the time).

Patient history sections/SOAP

 It is essential to do an instring search.

Why? because of speed of accessing information visually - i) We all think 
differently ii) We are like rats being conditioned by results. We s (often a 
word in the middle of a phrase which 'stands out' or is unusual,  than by 
typing the text at the start of a line.

There is also the question of how many terms you can fit in a list.

If you do a straight search at the start of a string, the phrase wheel would 
be populated by dozens of similar terms , carc... being a good example would 
bring up dozens and dozens of straight alphabetically listed (or weighted) 
carcinoma terms. To find a term within this list one would need to scroll 
down the list - time consuming. If you do an instring search on a more 
defined part of a word eg 'panc' you would immediately bring up all the 
pancreas stuff (carcinoma or not - but it dosn't matter because the resultant 
list is small and all fits into the phrase box without undue scrolling.

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2 Special Characters
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I'm not quite sure where all this arose from. I've found in practice that 
there are few characters one tends to use.

I note the examples like address@hidden Now, given that medical records are 
meant to be for general consumption I wouldn't think this is a good idea. 
Does it come, do you think, from the olden days of someone not being a touch 
typist, or having to abbreviate their sentances because they were time 
consuming to type?

The phrase wheel does away with this. You can pull up a whole sentance of your 
own with a couple of letters, as the system learns the whole sentance.

For example, if you are in the habit of describing the signs of middle ear 
infections as 'injected red drum, no perforation, fluid levels' then the 
minute you use this sentance the system records it with your Dr_ID tagged to 
it. Next kid with a middle ear infection, when typing in the notes, if you do 
an instr$ search and type no pe for example, up would come the entire 
sentance. Again, not a good example, because it is hard to find one off the 
top of ones head, but the principal is there.

That way, instead of your medical records becoming exactly the same as the 
next persons, it uses your own language. The inbuilt spell check takes care 
of grammatical mistakes.

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3 Auto-expansion
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I would avoid that in most situations. Nasty annoying things can happen when 
the system decides to expand an abbreviation when you don't want it. Trust me 
I've tried it. Some exceptions, I found tds, bd qid etc translated better for 
patients

Whilst on the subject, Spell checking is essential

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4. Word Suggesting - word autocompletion
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I'd love some smart person to implement the word autocompletion in open 
office. This saves heaps of typing once you get used to the keys to control 
it.

Hope all this helps.

regards

Richard


>
> - It is done at the frontend.
> - Just set the threshold for it high enough and you'll never
>   see it happen.
>
> > What if these characters have a meaning ? Maybe we should try to expand
> > special characters like
> >
> > "?aneurysm" = "possible anerysm"
>
> Different story. And of course they have a meaning. But we
> aren't trying to produce Shakespearean prose. If I wrote
> ?c2h5oh-abuse in my progress note I don't want that expanded
> in any way.
>
> Karsten