The World Wide Web has in recent years become a major and reliable delivery mechanism for a number of useful services. However, accessing those services can be a major headache as more often than not they are designed to be used by web browsers only. If you want to automate things such as using the Google api to implement your own search functions, you need to obtain your own developer's license .. and of course you need to know how to program.
A case in point. In New Zealand, we recently underwent a nationwide change in Zip codes, and it is now deemed necessary to incorporate the correct zip code as otherwise your mail will be delayed. The Post Office does supply a web lookup form to get the new zip codes, but you have to fill their form in with the number, street, town and city all in different fields. For 10,000 patients, this could become a little tedious.
Now the usual way to automate this is to look at the underlying HTML of the form, look at the form method, the form variables etc, and then write a script to automate populating the form with our data. We can do this, but the script has to be hard coded into Synapse, and this is not good. If the form changes, we have to recompile Synapse EMR to accommodate the change. And say, a user wants to use this data to go to some online white pages to check telephone numbers instead. They can't.
But there is now a solution, at least if you are using Firefox! Chickenfoot is a Firefox extension from some nice guys at MIT that allows you to control the browser using scripts. They give demo scripts for showing how to rearrange web pages, alter web pages by adding new buttons ( eg. adding a specific search button to google's search page ) and so forth. These scripts can be setup as triggers so that if you go to a specific web page, then the script is automatically run.
So, how does this help with the checking of 10,000 users and their Zip codes? Easy! We create a button on the patient details page. This generates a local web page with the address details. The chickenfoot script is automatically triggered, the address details are grabbed from our local web page, firefox is told to browse to the web page, fill it in, and then press the search button. Up then pops the new page with the patient's new zip code details.
Now since the chickenfoot script is local, and hosted in the browser, the user can write their own script to do a telephone search instead on their local whitepages directory. Neat!
How hard is chickenfoot? Not too hard, and you should be able to modify existing scripts to do what you need.
Here's my chickenfoot script that does the zip code search:
number = find(/Number: ([\w\s]+)/).groups[1];
street = find(/Street: ([\w\s]+)/).groups[1];
suburb = find(/Suburb: ([\w\s]+)/).groups[1];
city = find(/City: ([\w\s]+)/).groups[1];
with(openTab('http://www.nzpost.co.nz/Cultures/en-NZ/OnlineTools/PostCodeFinder/', true)) {
enter("Number",number)
enter("Street Name",street)
enter("Suburb",suburb)
enter("City",city)
click("SubmitAddressSearchImageButton")
}
What this means is that we can provide you with a way to search diagnoses, drugs etc on your favourite websites even if they are subscription based, and without the need for us to code these scripts within Synapse EMR. So, if you use Update.com or other subscription services, we can provide the local web page which your own script then takes you to the relevant search page there, fills it in, and brings up the required data.