Its purpose is to provide a recorded history of such conditions that you have or have experienced for use when visiting with or discussing health issues with your physician or insurance companies and may prove valuable while traveling away from home should an incident requiring medical attention occur.

 

It may also be of benefit to record conditions that others in your immediate family have had or are experiencing so that your doctor may factor that information into your treatment and prognosis.

 

Data Fields: There are several data fields available to you.

 

The data fields are contained on two lines on the screen. The fields are described from the first row left to right and then the second row.

 

1: The first is normally used to capture the general name of a condition or procedure, usually a generally recognized name that the condition or procedure is known as and referred to. You are limited to 50 characters for this field.

 

2: If important, you can record the technical or medical terminology for the condition or procedure. In some instances, there may be variations or stages of a condition so this may be of significant importance.You are limited to 255 characters for this field.

 

3: The third field can be used to record the attending physician, or person responsible for any treatment. You are limited to 72 characters for this field.

 

4: The fourth field can contain the approximate date of condition onset, diagnosis, surgery, accident or whatever. A date calendar is presented when you double-click in the date field. Select the date you want by clicking on the day. The calendar will close and the date you selected will be entered for you. The ‘<<’ and ‘>>’ buttons on the calendar screen move the year forward and backward, while the ‘<’ and ‘>’ buttons move the month forward and backward.

 

5: Next, you may select from a list or enter a brief phrase to indicate the current status of the condition. You are limited to 255 characters for this field.

 

6: You can also enter any type of description that is appropriate for the condition: either symptoms; diagnoses; prognoses; or whatever you feel is appropriate information. There is no limit to the number of characters you can store in this field.

 

On the second line, you will find the following fields.

 

7: You can enter or select a brief phrase for use as a report header category. When used, this field will always be used at the top of a report page and will cause a page break to occur for each value change. This is useful and can be used to organize your data by category (dermatology, natal, disease, etc.) or by physician or medical center, or anything else that is appropriate.  You are limited to 72 characters for this field.

 

8: The eighth data field is a hyperlink field that can be used to access a web-site relative to the condition, or to a document or folder where images, photos or other relevant material can be stored and referenced.  

 

9: The ninth field is a data field where you can capture any current treatment or other relevant information, if you have not done so already in another data field. There is no limit to the number of characters you can store in this field.

 

10: The last data field is an attachment field that can be used to store images, photos, scanned documents or other objects that can be opened and viewed by a program on your computer. You may store as many objects as you require.  

 

11: finally, there is a check box that you can set ‘On’ if for some reason you do not want a record to print on any report. It is used solely to control whether a record is included on a report or not, so it can be used even temporarily to cause a record not to appear in a report. It is not re-set automatically however. It will have to be reset should you want the record to appear on a subsequent report.

 

Data Sequence: You can change the sequence by right-clicking in any data field and then selecting either an ascending or descending sequence, based on the field you selected. The data will remain in that sequence when you next open the form, and until it is changed again.

 

Data Filtering: You can view subsets of the data by right-clicking in a data field and then clicking the 'Filter By' action item. You restore all of the data by closing and opening the screen or by right-clicking in the same field and choosing the 'Filter (Reset all records)' action item.

 

Printed Report: Clicking the ‘Report’ button will open a report that you can print if you wish. The report is organized by categories with a new page for each, that then into sections as determined by the status field.

 

Data Editing: You can double-click in most fields to open an edit box. This box shows multiple lines and the number of characters that are available to you for the field. Note that the two right-most data fields can be edited for style as well as for content.

 

If you would like to see how this data can be used, change to the ‘Sample’ user and view that data.

 

While the focus of the data fields is on medical conditions, do not overlook the fact that you can use the data fields to capture any type of related information that may be of assistance to a medical practitioner, such as allergies and intolerances (to food or medications), dietary requirements, physical characteristics (age, weight, height), and lifestyle issues (consumption of alcohol, smoking habits, diet, exercise, sleeping patterns and so on).

 

There is only one hyperlink available to you, but should you require additional linkages to other drug or disease related web-sites, you can always store their addresses in a description data field and then copy and paste the address into your web browser when you want to visit the site.

 

You can use the attachments data field to capture photos of your condition, although you cannot print the images you capture in this field.

 

You can delete a record by selecting it (clicking the box on the far left) and pressing the delete key or right-clicking and using the 'Cut' action option.

 

Note that it may be appropriate to maintain 2 or more lines of information about the same condition. For example, you may have one line to describe the condition itself, and another to describe a treatment, such as surgery, that was undertaken to resolve the condition. In such a case, the dates, attending physicians and information may differ considerably.