On Thursday 29 April 2004 00:22, Simon Child wrote:
> Trefor Roscoe wrote:
> > I need to know what the average length of referral letters is
>
> It must vary considerably, across different doctors, different
> specialities, and different patients
>
> > Anyone else got such an archive and would it be possible to look at
> > it in some way?
>
> We have about 13,000 rtf files going back about 4.5 years, these will be
> mixture of referral and 'other' letters.
No systematic differentiation by filename or directory position?
I did wonder if I woudl do better to give each document an accession number
and hope that staff would fill in an index entry to keep track of them, but I
think that would be optimistic even in a small practice.
In the event I started on teh first stage of the move toward keeping the
patient records in a "structured mess in a bucket" system.
> Anonymising 13,000 rtf files does not sound like a trivial task, and I
> can't see any practise releasing them unanonymised (I hope).
I think a few lines of Perl should do the job, in situ.
Whatever the job is.
--
Adrian Midgley (Linux desktop)
GP, Exeter
http://www.defoam.net/
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