Medication Favorites - ideas

Also, my GUI wouldn't break your method of !ramipril ..... so you could get to just ramipril doses by using your method.

One reason why avoiding the keyboard is not of dire need is that most meds can be distinguished from all other meds, by just the first three letters.

so, I wouldn't have to take my hand off the mouse, I could just use the other hand and "one finger tap" the 3 letters in (and press enter).

a tiny button to bring up the popup.

I like the location in front of the word drug:

Proposal:

individual drug shortcuts (optional).

drug categories

drug notes.

The find button is optional .. just using the enter key works too.

The add button is to add to your list of favorites.

The idea of a favorites list is to quickly bring up a prescribing schedule for a drug you know about. Whereas your scheme is a complete prescribing module based on drug categories. Quite a different functionality. So, your idea would in fact replace the main prescribing screen.

More explanation of drug shortcuts.

Now this is more like it ... but I think maybe we can get away from the !

Remember, this is not finalized... we are still prototyping.

I know. That is what I will use. I just suggested a quicker more intuitive location for [Find], I wont use it.

I know.


I suggest that the Medication Favorites Editing buttons (Add, Delete) don't need to be seen until you hit the [Edit] button, and when you do hit the [edit] button, the Prescribe (use) button doesn't need to be seen. Close is needed on both.

Note: I will not be adding drugs in real time, I will be doing my editing while patients are not around.

Jason,

I have used drug categorization in another EMR as a method of rapidly filtering the list of drugs. I can't say it was terribly helpful overall, but I'm keyboard centric.

I wholeheartedly agree with your keyboard-to-mouse issues. I've actually run stopwatch tests to see just how much time is lost with some functions while futzing around keyboard-to-mouse. Better to try and stick pretty much with keyboard or pretty much mouse if possible.

In my tests so far on synapse-linux, I find the new Med Fav list just what I expected. I used it on several patients today, and it's hardly any slower on the keyboard than the regular "Manage Medications" function. Just type in !Cyclobenzaprine, a dose, a sig, a couple more clicks and you're done. Next time it's !Cyclob and bingo!. Very cool. I'm impressed. I can see an extra button to select Med Fav for mouse-centric, with tabs or buttons to click to filter, but why not just make the clicks filter strickly alphabetical? As you say, you know exactly which med you're prescribing, not doing a fuzzy search here.

Don't put too many drugs in your favorites ... the format will probably change!

I agree I dont think drug categories is all that important, especially if we are going "the keyboard way" of picking drugs, not the mouse way.


The keyboard is the fastest method of computing, and I prefer the keyboard.

A great example of pesky mouse/keyboarding issues is the medications popup. When the window comes up, you have to manually click in the search field. I'd prefer it if it automatically started in the search field.

You can now define a short cut for a drug as above.

!Cyclo is okay if there is only one dose, but if you have multiple doses, you have to switch to mouse to make the selection.

now you can type eg. mtx25 for methotrexate 2.5 mg, or mtx10 for 10 mg and so forth.

Just using the updated Med Favorites this morning on synapse-linux...it's mistakenly inserting the dose into the schedule entry box. Tried it a few times just to make sure not a fluke.

Just a little further on this error.. the Medication Favorites popup actually works correctly if I force the GUI to come up, and use left click to highlight the desired line, which then makes the "Use" button turn green. Clicking "Use" then makes the medication insert correctly. But if there is only one dose for a Medication Favorite. and it inserts by just typing in "!Cyclo" or something, the dose will be inserted to the schedule box mistakenly.

Fixed.

Note that you should use <enter> and not <tab> after typing the macro - for the moment. This means the cursor ends up in the notes field.

Also double click on a drug is the same as the [Use] button.

[]

More suggestions.

Note to users: although a button to access the Med Fav Popup is needed, a workaround is typing just a ! in the search field.

I was going to put the shortcut before the drug name, but then changed my mind as I don't like backtabbing.

Now a lot of people will want to use shortcuts as it saves more time than looking up the GUI so that's why it is after the drug name now.

This GUI setup is working fine for me. Just a quick observation using the cyclobenzaprine example again. Let's say you only have one dose/sig for cyclobenzaprine 10 mg, 1 po TID prn "muscle spasm", and you have no other c's on your fav list yet. If you type !c in the search field and hit <Enter>, that dose and sig will be immediately inserted. Lets' say you want to add a shortcut of "cyclob" ... how to get to cyclobenzaprine to edit it? Just type in !c\ or some garbage characters after c in the search field. When the Med Fav GUI launches, if nothing is displayed to edit, use Bkspace, and keep deleting characters from right to left in the "Name" field, hitting "Enter" after each deletion until your name/sig/dose appears... then you can edit it.

I should have noted that, conversely, you can just type in ! in the search window to bring up the Med Fav GUI, type and start typing in "c" and more letters, hitting <Enter> until the drug/dose/sig comes up that you want to edit.

Do any of you have a slick idea about how to name Medication Favorite shortcuts? The idea is to have a quick rule you can apply that you will remember to call up shortcuts.

I've put a little thought into this in the past... I used to use the scheme of the first 4 letters of whatever, or if 2 names the first letter of the first name and last 4 letters of second name. This scheme won't work for, say cyclobenzaprine.... would bring up cyclophosphamid, cyclocort, cyclo-whatever.

As Graham points out, we can now have the dose/sig, so maybe 6 letters, and dose/sig, like cyclob10tid, or cyclob5tid?