Usability is important
You are a user
I know it’s not the most usable site, but soapnote.org is essentially all about usability. (Irony)
The more patients you can see in a day, the more good you can do.
The things that work against us seeing the most patients in a day should be fixed.
(I’m on a roll.)
A higher quality visit is a more effective visit.
If we have less distractions from the person we are seeing, the visit will be better.
(Are you with me?)
Clicks can become automatic but they are a distraction.
You know what you want to say and there are tugs and nudges that pull you away from it.
(Right?)
An electronic health record is a form connected to a database.
(You probably knew that intuitively.)
Usability matters
The more usable the form, the less you feel the nudges and tugs and the more you engage with the person who gave up time in their life to see you.
At some point soapnote.org will be irrelevant and obsolete. Maybe very soon. By means of robots, or AI, or machine learning, or some other technology that is smarter than soapnote.org.
But clinicians (users) need to acknowledge that usability is relevant or maybe even important.
(End of rant)
Newish features
So here’s the new stuff on soapnote.org to show your clinical applications coordinator, EHR sales rep, IT person, or whoever else it is that’s somehow wedged themself into your workflow:
1) I made up something called “The Structured Data Index” because I have mental problems when I have to click on a lot of stuff. It goes from 0 to 1. 1 means that everything on the form is a click and 0 is paradise. It’s part of another thing which I called “Sandbox Metrics” which is just a tally of all the checkboxes and drop down items and other form parts. I may be wrong that a low Structured Data Index is good and I’m wrong about stuff all day every day. But at least you can see for yourself on the site and find and make forms and see which ones work for you and which don’t.
2) Since life isn’t perfect and we can’t live in a Structured Data Index of 0, it’s probably a good idea to have an idea of what each of those horrible clicks means. In purgatory, each click ends up in a database. So I borrowed a term for databases called the “Data Dictionary” and it displays the form as an outline (or more like a table I guess). Every form on the site (all the old ones and any new one you make today) has a Data Dictionary. So – using this page as an example – I’ll show you the different views for every form on the site.
This is a picture of where you pick the different views for the form
This shows you the three options – Live Form, Edit Markup, and Data Dictionary.
This is what happens when you click (sigh.) on ‘Edit Markup’.
This is what you see when you click (ugh.) on ‘Data Dictionary’!!!!
3) soapnote.org isn’t an electronic health record. That would be nuts. It doesn’t store anything you enter into it.If there’s some reason that you’d like to store the (yuck) structured data from your forms, you can download it as a CSV file and save it for some future masochistic purpose. That’s a little easier to do now and some of the buttons make more sense than they did last year.
Click here to export or save as CSV
4) Or you could email the form content to yourself. If you live on a desert island don’t have government rules about privacy, you could actually use email as an electronic health record. (Please don’t do that)
click here to email results
5) Or you could make a form and send it out to people and have them send their response back to you so you have enough cookies and cakes at your party. Because there’s always a shortage of cookies and cakes at parties. Because soapnote.org is just a website for making and sharing forms. Or you could do something to improve your cat.