[log in to unmask],Net wrote at 18:21 on 04/11/98 
about "Re: Record Storage":
-----------------------------

> Phase one I suggest is to reduce the growth of paper by stopping 
> filing a copy of each letter out of the practice, but merely retain 
> the word-processed file and use a simple viewer or macro to retrieve 
> it whenever the relevant patient is in the building...what clinical 
> system are you using?  We introduced this some years ago, and it is 
> vry simple, cheap and quick.>>
>
>A v.good point which I will revisit.We reverted to filing letters,
rather than
>just keeping the WP file when I was told off at a GP training visit
because I
>was not keeping hard copies of letters in the notes.
Did they have you making duplicate notes, handwriting and typing the 
same thing in the main record?  If not then they have a brain 
failure somewhere.

>No ideas how to do the
>simple viewer or macro though.
>
>Jenny
-----------------------------
What WP do you have the letters typed in?
S6000 seems to be able to store the letter as a Word or whatever 
document within the database, which all modern databases will do, so 
the letters are near enough part of the record anyway...

It is almost certainly the case that Lyrix would do the same for you 
if you get a suitable Unix nerd to write the code, but there are 
probably better approaches, and anyway if you are all on PCs not 
terminals you won't have Lyrix to hand.  

Our system is to save all patient letters using the patient id 
number, with an extension which uses the first character to indicate 
the sort of document, ~ or # depending on how the letter was 
generated, and two digits to indicate the sequential number, 01 to 
99
The viewer does nothing that Word could not do, in displaying them 
by patient number, but also looks up the patient by name which is a 
good hour's worth of programming to implement.

You might need some way of topping up a list of patients from your 
Unix system, which is held as a file in a directory accessible to 
DOS/Windows, but that could run every night at midnight 
automatically...

Other functions I built into the viewer "Letters Outward" are 
filters for Windows Write files, Word version 2 and 6.  GOing to a 
32 bit version would give it the ability to handle RTF and of course 
it is no harder to save it all in HTML.

As time goes on, a "cat" command becomes useful, to pile the text of 
all the letters into a single file, for printing out when they 
leave, in very small print.
--- OffRoad 1.9r registered to Adrian Midgley


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