Hello World - A Message from Russ

I guess I'll follow Scott's example. I'm Russ Garlow Jr, I work at South Georgia Medical Center in Valdosta, GA. We're a 335 bed, 3k+ employee hospital in Southwest GA. We have an outstanding CPOE dept with six members, but I'm the first dedicated iForm designer. The others did some tweaking before I came on board, but none of them really had time to delve into the murky depths of iForms or VGR. They had looked at outsourcing it, but that wasn't practical based on the number of forms we would have and the time that needs to go into them. You really need to have someone working on them full time. So they got me and sent me to training.



 I met Scott at McKesson's VGR class in April and had a couple of very good conversations on the subject and I'm very glad he's invited me to be a part of this project. I had seven years in medical software when I took this job and have programmed here and there, but none of it really compares to what I do now. Not that it's especially hard, it's just very different from anything else. It's half webpage design, half middle layer programming, half medical knowledge, and half efficiency engineering.

I too am "the iForm guy" and have had the joy of fumbling around in the dark without much direction trying to figure out how iForms and VGR work. There really is nothing out there in this field. My hope is that this reference will help others avoid some of those problems. I have been working on iForms since February 2012 and I'm still learning what will and won't work.

When I began, we had 72 forms, which were either just as they came from McKesson or from Zynx. The McKesson forms weren't too bad, the content required some tuning, but they offered a good bit of functionality in a small space. The Zynx forms (don't be offended Zynx, they're great for getting off the ground) are horribly long and the functionality is overly complicated. So I dove headfirst into compacting the Zynx forms.

There's much that can be done with a little HTML knowledge and a few good ideas, but you really have to know Javascript (or some other scripting language, one fellow here uses VBscript) to get the most functionality. I went through four versions before settling on the format I'm using now. First I just compacted the Zynx forms, combining radio buttons into dropdowns, removing excess, combining like VGR and compacting it with If Else statements. Then I added CSS to it, to get away from the dull black text on white background. Next I started adding some functions with JS such as highlighting, tabs, menu options that changed based on previous choices, and select-group checkboxes. After that I got into JQuery UI which allows you to design a whole "look" and download it, along with an example page that has tabs, buttons, accordions, etc. I've really taken to JQuery UI to make it "pretty" as well as functional. What I'm getting at is this, it's been a growing project. I hope that you can skip some of the steps I had to take to get the look we have now.

A few quick lessons I've learned that will save you some time and/or grief:

1. LIMIT SCROLLING... I can't say that strongly enough, the thing our doctors hate most is scrolling.
2. Reduce clicking. If you can reduce the page flow by one click DO IT. Even if it takes extra time to develop. Click count is like your golf score, you never get to zero, but the lower the better.
3. Think compact, make the most out of the space you have, use the whole page.
4. Make it easy to read, don't use all caps, use lower contrast color selections (not black and white) and no overly bright colors Our people have their nose in the program all day, help reduce their eye fatigue
5. Test. Test. Test. If there are ANY flaws in your page, it will come out on the floor.
6. Remember why you're doing this, the goal is to provide the best healthcare, if your form doesn't have that goal in mind, they won't like it

Anywho, I think that's enough rambling for one post. I'm glad you found this page and I hope it helps you and your hospital develop the best material that can be developed. Please don't be afraid to ask questions, make suggestions, or to contact us for help. Like Scott mentioned, we're trying to build a community of iForm developers and that includes everyone, experienced or not. 

It's also worth mentioning that my hospital is a Zynx Reference Hospital, so if you're going or have gone that route and would like to talk to our CPOE dept and yours truly,  to get some ideas, ask some questions, or just talk to some kindred spirits, we're more than happy to do that. Just shoot me an email and we'll set it up.

And last of all, the ideas and opinions expressed here are my own and not those of SGMC, it's affiliates, or any other organization, blah, blah, etc. Trademarked thingies belong to the thingy holders, I'm just talking about them to help people.