Efficient Population of Structured Data Forms for Medical Records Using Syntactic Constraints and Intermediate Text

This poster presents an innovative user-support method for structured data entry that resulted from working with a large patient registry reporting group in a leading hospital, tasked with efficient electronic medical record discretization. It is a method of using syntactic constraints on various fields during web-forms coding, to auto-select the fields where values belong, this allows coders to spend more time looking at the clinical narrative documentation and less time attending to the mouse, the browser, and field-selection on the data entry pages. The method is to meta-program a "floating text box" for intermediate, semi-structured notes, with behavior specific to the choices on that page. It bridges the gap between abbreviations, which are easy, and datamining natural language text, which is hard. The ideas can be generalized to auto-filling forms and semi-autonomous forms filling beyond the medical domain.