A Thousand Hits

For whatever strange reason, I like to keep an eye on the statistics of the blog, how many visits we get in a given day and what kinds of articles people are reading.  It's not that I'm an attention hog (as far as I can tell), but I like to know that what we're doing here is actually helping people.

I started this blog two months ago and today we got our 1,000th view.  In my first post, dated 4/28, I said,

"I couldn't find anything, and I mean ANYTHING when searching for HEO, VGR, or iForms on any of the major search engines that was referential or helpful for iForm-specific development. I know that there are some resources out there (we'll go over those), but as they say, 'If you can't find it, it [essentially] doesn't exist.'"

I guess I wasn't the only one that has been looking.

Help Your Users With Quick Orders - Uncheck All

Part of the convenience of iForms is the ability to "pre-check" items, meaning that when the iForm is opened, some checkboxes start with the check mark already in it.  This makes an iForm work like an orderset that has a number of "order with previous" items.

However, when we first started making iForms, especially long or complicated ones, we felt like we had to tread a thin line regarding what items were pre-checked, not because we doubted the clinical necessity or contribution, but because we foresaw situations in which a physician may want to order just a few common things instead of the entire she-bang.

Welcome, Make Yourself at Home

I've been watching the traffic for the blog for these last few weeks and it seems that my assumption was correct. Even with the vast reaches of the Internet, there really isn't much to be found about McKesson's VGR scripting language and so people are ending up here. So welcome, we're so glad that you found us.

As you've probably noticed, Russ and I like to tackle problems and share ideas. If you ever have any questions about the solutions that we propose here, please don't hesitate to ask. I can't promise that we'll always have answers or that we will be able to respond very quickly, but I can promise that we'll help whenever and however we can. We have more ideas of what to share in the coming weeks, but your questions could turn into blog posts of their own.

If you've found this blog to be helpful, and even if you don't have any questions, take a second to leave a comment or just to say hello. It will help us keep motivated to know that real people are out there.

Hiding Dropdowns

The Problem

So you're condensing your form and you come to an item that can be taken orally or via IV but each option has a different set of frequencies. You don't want to create one large frequency dropdown with some options that would be wrong for each. So what do you do?

Reason for Exam Prompt

We had to add this to several of our forms recently, so I thought I'd show you our solution to it.

The Problem

We have to put a reason for exam text box on our radiology items. If we put one box that loads the same reason into each load string, it's simple, but doesn't offer our doctors much flexibility. However, putting a separate reason box on each item can be unwieldy and if they're all for the same reason, time consuming.