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GRAPEFRUIT JUICE RULE REMINDERS (User's Manual, pgs. 390-402)

Grapefruit juice affects the levels of many medications. Welford Chart Notes has incorporated these warnings into its Patient Education Brochures, so you can warn your patients about this by giving them these Brochures when you start them on medications. But what if you want to warn them after the time when you first started them on the medication?

The answer is to write some Rule Reminders about drugs which interact with grapefruit juice. However, you probably don't want to remind the patient EVERY time you see the patient. You will probably want to warn the patient once, or perhaps remind the patient at some interval, such as once a year. In order to accomplish this, you need to keep track of which patients you have warned and when. The way to do this is to create your own user-defined Lab Test. Then, when you have reminded the patient, store this information in the user-defined Lab Test. Here's how:

8. Write a second Rule Reminder similar to the first, only for the Rule, type in "(on sertraline or on simvastatin or on sirolimus or on triazolam or on verapamil) and never had grapefruit reminder".

When you open a patient's chart and the Rule Reminder appears, if you then remind the patient not to have grapefruit juice, you should record that fact in the patient's Lab Book under the test name GRAPEFRUIT REMINDER. You might even want to create a Contraction, like "grg", to stand for "Grapefruit reminder given", and place it into your note for documentation. Then, when you store the note if you have enabled Lab Book Parsing (System\Parser Options\Parse Lab Book is checked), the program will update the patient's Lab Book for you. (In version 3.9, the program will also have a Lab button right on the Rule Reminder screen so you can open the Lab Book on the spot and add the grapefruit reminder directly).

We are beta testing a brand new Welford Chart Notes for Windows - SQL Version which we have developed over the past year. This version stores the program's data in Microsoft SQL Server, instead of in our own proprietary database. This allows users free access to their data, and allows the program to scale up to much larger installations without loss of performance. We also have added dozens of new features to version 3.9 (of both the SQL and the 32-bit versions), also undergoing beta testing. For example, in version 3.9 you will be able to print postcards or letters from the Appointment Scheduler reminding patients of upcoming appointments. The Image Utility has a new Effects button which lets you apply a huge array of filtering and special effects to your images, to make them sharper or easier to view. You can zoom the Lab Book Graph to full screen, and can view height and weight percentile graphs in standard format similar to published paper forms.