Richard Rathe, MD

Associate Professor of Family Medicine (ret.) and Medical Informatician

‘EMR’ Articles

ShortNote – Clinical Shorthand 1.0

Posted: Aug 17th, 2017 •• Category: EMR, HPI, Patient Care

I have worked with home-grown and commercial Electronic Medical Records for over thirty years. The use of “dot commands” (a period followed by a trigger phrase) is about as old as personal computing. (I first encountered dot commands in the WordStar word processing program during the 1980s!) These commands generally fall into three categories: a) links to retrieve […]

QuickHPI v1.2 – Fully Functional Client-Side Web App

Posted: Jan 30th, 2015 •• Category: EMR, HPI, Teaching

This is the first release of quickHPI for general use by students, residents and clinicians. It is based on version 1.1 with persistent client-side data storage added. Once installed, it can be used offline when network connectivity is unavailable or undesired. The purpose of quickHPI is threefold: 1) Provide a practical tool for clinicians; 2) […]

“Least Ink” Principal for Medical Documentation

Posted: Aug 12th, 2014 •• Category: EMR

The best clinical documentation is that which gives to the reader the greatest amount of information in the shortest time with the fewest pixels. Paraphrased from Edward R. Tufte The Visual Display of Quantitative Information  During April 2014 I gave a talk at an EMR meeting concerning the changes manifest in the everyday clinic note. […]