User Guide

Author : Ashley G Trüter
Updated: 18-Jul-2007
Purpose: Describes the use of RecordMan.

Contents:

1. Main Menu

Clicking the RecordMan program icon will display the following menu.

The following sections cover each of the above options in order.

1.1 Patient Consultations

This option is the primary means by which you manage a patient's consultation records.

Note

Throughout this document we use a medical example where the Settings menu option (see later) has been used to assign the terms “Patient” and “Consultation” to our files and records respectively. If we set these terms to “Client” and “Visit” then this option would read “Client Visits" instead.

1.1.1 Directory Structure

RecordMan requires a physical directory structure to map its file numbers and record dates to. In the example below we have “pointed” RecordMan at an existing ImageMan directory structure.

1.1.2 Searching Your Files

Clicking Patient Consultations will bring up the Patient List window where you can enter a patient number or name to search on.

The results are displayed in a multi-column scrollable table. Note that you can resize the columns (to see a long address for example) by left-click dragging the column separators. You can also click a column heading to toggle its sort mode between ascending and descending (to group results by surname for example).

Double-click a patient to bring up the Patient Summary dialog (see later).

1.1.3 New Patient

Clicking New Patient (only visible if OPM is not being used) creates a new patient file and lets you update it using the following dialog.

1.2 Database Query

Selecting this option will prompt for a form to run and then allow you to query it. The form will appear as follows.

1.2.1 Find All

Clicking Find All performs an “All” search, equivalent to a boolean “AND” operation. Clicking this button in the above example would return all forms that had a firstname of “Donald” AND a surname of “Trump”.

Clicking this button without entering any search criteria will return all forms of the same name that have any data.

1.2.2 Find Any

Clicking Find Any performs an “Any” search, equivalent to a boolean “OR” operation. Clicking this button in the above example would return all forms that had a firstname of “Donald” OR a surname of “Trump”.

Clicking this button without entering any search criteria will return all forms of the same name that have any data.

1.2.3 Query Results list

A successful query will return a list of results similar to the following.

From here you can selectively view form(s) that meet your search criteria.

1.3 Form*Designer

This menu option is covered in the Designer Guide.

1.4 Settings

This menu option is covered in the Install Guide.

2. Patient Summary

From this screen you can manage every aspect of a patient's records.

A quick run-through of the screen (from left to right, top to bottom).

• Patient Details in a scrollable list (the button above the list displays the Patient Details update dialog)
• Last Treatment date and text
• Consultations in a three column sortable table with Back option to leave selected consultation
• Significant Patient History (editable) and a Save option
• Last Diagnosis date and text
• Forms Used (a list of all forms attached to this patient and consultation date) and a Start Consult button to start a new consultation – clicking a form will open it
• Images attached to this patient and consultation date
• An Alert button (mapped to the ImageMan alert.txt file so both systems share the same data) that is displayed red if any text is present
• An Attach button that prompts for a location and file to attach
• Attachments (files located in the patient's numbered directory, or matching consultation date directory if a consultation is currently selected) – clicking an attachment will open it
• Last Spectacle Rx details
• Last Contact Lens Rx details

Clicking a consultation record will refresh the screen as indicated below:

Note that the ImageMan thumbnails have been picked up (clicking them will open the full size JPEG image), and the Forms Used and Attachments lists have been updated.

The Back button on the top right of the screen is used to “go back” to the previous screen (i.e. reload patient attachments and blank out the consultation thumbnail images).

2.1 New Consultation

The Start Consult button starts a new consultation with the following window.

Alternatively, if forms already exist for this consultation then the following dialog will be displayed.

In either case, after answering "OK" or "Yes", you will be prompted for a new form to add to the current consultation.

2.2 Add a form

The new form, using our Patient Details example from before, will look something like this.

Note that the window title includes the following information:

• Consultation date
• Form sequence number (#1 for a new consultation)
• Form name
• Patient name

A number of buttons appear at the base of the form and are explained below.

2.2.1 Print

Clicking this will create a B&W PNG image of the form as it currently appears on the screen (less its window title-bar and action buttons) and open it with the default OS image viewer.

For simple forms, this default behaviour may satisfy your reporting needs and not oblige you to create report templates (see later).

2.2.2 Save

Clicking Save will save the current form.

2.2.3 Previous

Clicking Previous will save the current form and bring the previous form to the foreground.

2.2.4 Next

Clicking Next will save the current form and bring the next form to the foreground, unless this is the last form in the chain (in which case you will be prompted for another form to "daisy chain" to the current consultation).

2.2.5 Summary

Clicking Summary will save the current form before closing all open forms and displaying the Consultation Summary (see next).

Warning!

While you can have multiple forms open at the same time and swap between them by clicking on a window to bring it into the foreground, any changes you make are only saved when you click a button on the form with the changes.

2.3 Consultation Summary

Clicking Summary on a form will display the following dialog.

The Diagnostic Findings are populated with text that was "marked" in prior forms (by pressing a "mark" bar to the right of a form's fields).

The Consult Reason is presented again (as it may have changed now that the consultation is completed).

The remaining fields, if completed, are copied back to the Patient Summary screen.

Click Finish (which replaces the Summary button) to save your changes and close the dialog. A record of your changes is appended to export.txt and has the following format:

ID,"7"
Date,"11-Nov-2006"
User,"Jane"
History,"Marked text"
2,"Review"
END,

where each line is a key / value pair, with the first four keys named and the remainder being sequence numbers and only present if data was entered.

3. Consultations

3.1 Working with old forms

The forms we have discussed so far are all "current" in that they are from today's consultation date, but what happens when we select a previous consultation date and view its forms? RecordMan does several things to ensure you know you are working with old consultation forms.

Attribute	Current Forms	Old Forms
Landscape Display	Left side of screen	Right side of screen
Portrait Display	Top half of screen	Bottom half of screen
Colour	Standard background colour	Pale yellow tool-tip colour
Save button	Saves form	Replaced with a prompted Update option
Summary button	Saves form and creates a consultation summary	Replaced with Finish option

This allows you to view and compare forms from previous consultations whilst continuing to work on the current consultation, as shown in the example below.

3.2 Consultation work-flow

Working with consultations is so fundamental to using RecordMan effectively that the three types of consultations (New, Continued and Old) are summarized below.

3.2.1 Starting a New Consultation

• Clicking Start Consult will prompt for a new form to display on the left side of the screen. Clicking Next will prompt for the next form to enter and so on.
• Clicking Prev will bring the previous form to the front (reloading it from disk if it has been closed). Clicking Prev on the first form in the sequence will prompt with an alert. Note that the title of the form is preceded with both the consultation date and the sequence number of the form.
• Clicking Next will reverse this process until the last form is reached, at which point it reverts to prompting for another form to enter.
• Clicking Summary will close all forms and display the Consultation Summary form.

Important

Clicking any button on a new form will save all changes (the Save button just lets you save your work without forcing you to do anything else).

3.2.2 Continuing an Existing Consultation

• Clicking Start Consult again at a later stage during the day (for the same patient) will prompt for you to continue the consultation and will automatically take you to the last form as determined by its alphabetically sorted position in the Forms list.
• Alternatively, clicking a specific form from the Forms list of will take you directly to the form (and it will have the same sequence as its position in the list; i.e. Clicking the 2nd form in a list of three will take you to form 2 of 3).
• In all other respects, the process operates the same as for a New Consultation as detailed above.

3.2.3 Viewing an Old Consultation

• Clicking a previous consult date and then a form from the Forms list will open the selected form (as per above) on the right side of the screen; and then, because clicking to select this form bought the Patient Summary screen into focus possibly obscuring a form you were looking at, the form you were last on (displayed on the left) will also be bought back into focus (the reverse also holds true).
• Most other operations are similar to that of a New Consultation except clicking Next on the last form will not prompt for another form to add; and clicking Update will prompt to confirm whether you really want to update an old record (unlike a New Consultation, the other buttons do not save changes you make to an old form).
• Clicking Finish will close all forms and return you to the Patient Summary Screen.

Note

Later versions of RecordMan do not allow you to update old records, so the Update button will not appear.

4. Reporting

4.1 Substitution Variables

Substitution variables are keywords proceeded and followed by a percentage sign (e.g. %ID%) that are replaced with a value at runtime. These variables can be used in three places:

1. In a field's default text value
2. As part or all of boilerplate text
3. In a report template

Note that you can freely mix boilerplate text and variables, such as:

Hello, my name is %SYSUSER% and today is %DAY%!

Substitution variables fall into the following four categories.

4.1.1 System

UNKNOWN     Current value of Settings|Unknown
YES         Current value of Settings|Yes
NO          Current value of Settings|No
DAY         Current day
MONTH       Current month
SYSSTATE    Default state
SYSDATE     Date in DD-MON-YYYY format (e.g. 3-Jun-2004)
SYSTIME     Time in 24 hour HH:MM:SS format (e.g. 21:53:06)
SYSUSER     User name (e.g. Bob)
SYSHOST     Host name (e.g. WORKPC)

4.1.2 File

ID
TITLE
FIRSTNAME
SURNAME
MEDICARE
DOB
STREET
STATE
CITY
SUBURB
PHONE1
PHONE2
EMAIL
NOTE
RECALL_DATE
RECALL_TYPE
ALERT
HISTORY

4.1.3 Record

AGE         Age of current patient
DESC        Current file description
DATE        Current record date

4.1.4 Form

In addition to these "named" variables, you can access data element values by way of their sequence numbers (e.g. %2% would be substituted with the value of the "Firstname" field in our Patient Details form).

A substitution variable referring to a non-existent or empty value is instead replaced with the value contained in %UNKNOWN%.

4.2 Report Templates

Creating report templates for your forms is easy. Just create a directory with the same name as your form under the Templates directory as so:

then create AbiWord documents in the directory based on the Sample.abw in the Templates directory.

At runtime a drop-list will display available reports for each form with a matching template directory that contains one or more AbiWord report templates. Clicking a report name in this list will generate a report into the Reports directory with a name in the form:

YYYY-MM-DD ReportName - PatientName.abw

This makes it easy to sort and find previous reports.