Re: [Gnumed-devel] Phrase Wheel - a few comments

[Karsten Hilbert]

> 1 Substring matching is Section dependant and Editing Area Line Dependant
IOW it is context-dependant.

Hence I implemented the three thresholds for
phrase-boundary, word-boundary, and instring matching.

> We don't think substrings, e.g if I want ranitidine,
In that case the programmer sets:

phrase threshold = 2
    - so "ra" -> "ra*"
word threshold = 3
    - so "ran" -> "ranitidine Hexal" and "Roche Ranitidine"
instring threshold = 128
    - i.e. it never happens, not even when editing

> I dont type in 'tid', or 
Unless you wanted to pull up the "*tid*"ines and you were
wondering if there's anything else besides Ranitidine and
Cimetidine ;-)

> if I want a brand I don't type in 'xil' for Amoxil. Yet on the line with 
But you might type (especially as a less experienced
prescriber) "cilli" which would bring about Amoxicillines,
Pencillins, Benzyl-Penicillines and Infecto-Bicillin (a brand
name here).

This is a matter of personal taste/debate, though.

> Patient history sections/SOAP
>  It is essential to do an instring search.
Sure !  Set the thresholds accordingly.

> 2 Special Characters
> 
> I'm not quite sure where all this arose from. I've found in practice that 
> there are few characters one tends to use.
Sure, I was just trying to kill the usually available ASCII
set.

> 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. 
I wouldn't write something like that but why not catch it if
we can ? The question is: Does it make sense to treat @ as a
word separator or should it rather be an ignored_char ?

> 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?
Yes :-)

I have observed this @Chiang Mai University Medical School
where interns&residents liked 2b hip and use SMS talk in the
medical record for brevity. I do not think it is the job of
the phrase wheel to censor the way one expresses one's
thoughts.

> 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 
It would already come up earlier, during the in-phrase
word-boundary search so that you can set the instr$ threshold
higher such as to not be bothered by undue instring matches.

> 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.
Can you describe it in one of those excellent spec docs ?

Maybe it'd be useful to extract the generic phrase-wheel specs
into their own document ?

Karsten
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