WELFORD CHART NOTES

NEWSLETTER

Volume 22, No. 4 April, 2003

copyright 2003, Welford Medical Computing, Inc. All rights reserved

USING THE DETAILED PROGRAM LOG (User's Manual, pgs. 762-763)

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The Program Log has been greatly enhanced in version 4.3 to allow you to see exactly when a data item is recorded, changed, or deleted. You can therefore trace how an item came to be recorded as you see it now.

In order to have the program keep track of this additional information, press System\Security\Options and set the Program Log Level to Detailed. (You can always inactivate the Detailed Program Log by setting this Option to a lower level, such as Subfunctions. However, if you do so, the information stored when you were using the Detailed Program Log is still stored; the program merely stops storing new information to that level of detail). Activating the Detailed Program Log does add considerably more data to your hard disk (about 10,000-30,000 bytes per physician per day), so make sure you have plenty of free space on your hard disk.

Once you have activated the Detailed Program Log, you can search for information within it. For example, suppose you want to find out who changed the dose of enalapril for Kelly Erickson from 5 mg po qd to 10 mg po qd, and when they did it:

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1. Press System\Security\Log.

2. For Begin Date, enter the earliest date that you think this happened. Suppose you know from the patient's Medication\Utility\History that the dosage was changed during March, 2003. Enter 3-1-2003 as the Begin Date.

2. For End Date, enter 3-31-2003.

3. If you know the name of the Function, you can enter it here (in this case it is Medication Edit). If you aren't sure, just leave it as ANY, although you may get some extraneous matches using ANY.

4. Enter KELLY ERICKSON as the name of the Patient.

5. Leave the User set to ANY, unless you are only interested seeing the actions of a single user, in which case you should specify that user.

6. For Detail, type in ENALAPRIL. The program searches all of the detailed Program Log text for the text you type here. For medications, enter the generic name. For diagnoses, enter the main meaning as defined in the Vocabulary System. You can also enter test names, or text that might be in another field such as a Comment.

7. Press Display to see the results that match your criteria.

8. For each match in the Display, if there is detailed information about that item, the Detail button is enabled. If not, the Detail button is grayed. Not all items in the Program Log have detailed information. Here we see 2 times where Kelly Erickson had her enalapril dose edited.

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9. To view the detailed information, either double-click the item, or highlight it and press the Detail button.

10. You can then read what workstation the user was on (Computer Name), what the item was before the user edited it (5 mg po qd), and what the information was after the user edited it (10 mg po qd). Sometimes, there is so much information in one of the panes that you can't see all of it at once. In that case, you can either use the scroll bars to view it, or highlight the pane and press the Zoom button, which puts the entire contents of that pane in a full screen window so that you can view more of it at once. You can also zoom a pane by double-clicking on it.

 

APRIL QUARTERLY UPDATE RELEASED

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This month we are releasing the April, 2002 Quarterly Update. The update includes new medications, diagnostic terms, drug interactions, drug dosing information, spelling words, drug-disease Alerts, Web Links, and dozens of new patient education brochures. This update has over 5700 drug interactions with over 2100 references, over 10,700 Alerts, over 9700 Web Links, and over 1200 Brochures, including new or revised Brochures on dozens of topics including appendicitis, ciguatera, hyperlipidemia, menopause, migraine, osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, typhoid fever, dornase, ibritumomab tiuxetan, oxaliplatin, rasburicase, and many others. If you have let your support lapse, contact MEDCOM Information Systems to renew your support and receive this new update.

SEND US YOUR TIPS

If you have tips, shortcuts, guestions, or suggestions for future newsletter topics, please send them to us at:

Welford Medical Computing, Inc.

3779 Hermitage Trail

Rockford, IL 61114

or

MEDCOM Information Systems, Inc.

2117 Stonington Avenue

Hoffman Estates, IL 60195

http://medcom@emirj.com