Currently Synapse supports exporting text to MS Word .. basically because it had the easiest way of communicating via the COM interface. And if you wanted to create a Rich Document with lots of fonts etc, Word was the easiest way to do this. But it seems to me that we can create templates for various documents in Rich Text Formats, and upload them to Googledocs for final touch up and printing. Each document might be able to go into a patient's directory inside your googledocs folders. So, if you happen to have an internet connection but you're on a PC without MS Word ... well, this might work very well. The final document ends up on googeldocs instead of Synapse server ...although we could probably just download it, and store it in Synapse, or just store the URL. Allowing others to access the document might also be tricky too...
Interesting idea, I dont think it's worth pursuing until someone really needs this feature. An important question is why are people needing to do this at all ? The lack of structure in the Consult Note ? Before we add another thing no other EMR can do, I think we should buckle down and review the usability of the core features of Synapse. On top of that, for this not that needed feature, seems like a fairly substantial security risk.
Actually I have implemented a very early version of this for the Physician Web Portal. This is just to tie things over until I get real editing there .. but you can now bring up a googledoc which has been templated in the web portal.
Just tried this ... created a RTF document with a logo in it. Uploaded this template .. and used it from the web portal. Bingo .. it appears in Googledocs with the logo intact!
Looks like I can support Word 2007's docx format for a template, and perhaps the ODT ( open document ) as well. Both of these are compressed collections, and in the case of docx, there is a document.xml present which I can manipulate. But I have to unzip, alter the document.xml, rezip and then upload to googledocs. There may be appreciable delays though I gather it's pretty fast as it is now.
I can see why this can be very useful. Now I'm using postcript templates and print to local PDF to create consults notes, but I can only do this on my computer when logged in with my acount. If you don't have word installed on evey PC in your office, the secretary can use this method to print out a formatted notewhen she receives a request but can't find the note in print history.
