Automated letter generation

Question

I work for a doctor and am looking for a solution to speed up his process of composing medical reports. Most of the text in the medical reports are redundant and should be able to be generated by a selection process

What I would like is to present him with a form with various options, checkboxes and the selections he makes will drive the generation of the report and create a word document that he can then fine tune or just save/print/whatever.

For instance he will be prompted with:

Age: ______  
Gender : () Male, () Female  
Length of Condition : () Week () Month () Year  
Pain involving: [] Neck, [] Shoulder, [] Chest, [] Hip, [] Leg, etc....

This subset of the form would generate the following sentence:

"This is a 38 year old woman with a month history of pain in the leg"

I'd like the process to be data driven (as much as possible), so changes to the selection choices don't require reprogramming.

I would suspect that he is not the first person to ask for a system like this. So my first question is has anybody come across any existing software that we can purchase that would meet our needs?

In the event that no pre-packaged software is out there, I'd like some input as to general design strategies. What kind of data structure would you use to store the choices? How do I interface with word to create the document?

If I were to write this myself my language of choice would be C#.

EDIT: A number of suggestion where made assuming that I'm looking for a Medical records package. I don't think that is a solution to the problem I'm addressing.

The doctor is simply looking for a tool to automate his report writing. His reports are usually submitted as part of a workmans comp or no-fault case. They are for external consumption, and not usually not referred back to internally after the fact.

ANOTHER POINT: The functionality I'm looking for isn't specific to the medical community. I'm looking for a tool where a given checkbox/radio button generates a specific sentence, and the mapping is configured by the user. Sort of a form letter on steriods.

Answer 1

We automate creation of sales tax returns using open source PDF libraries. We're on Java, but here are some options for PDF generation on .Net.

In our case we work with a specific form template that the states provide and fill in amounts programaticly. It sounds like you're looking to accomplish something very similar.

Answer 2

You may want to have a look at medical, an electronic health record module for Open ERP. There are also a variety of commercial packages out there; e-MDs, for example, provides this specific feature.

Answer 3

1. Yes, there is definitely software out there that does this. You're looking for medical records software. The specifics of the software really depend on where the doctor is located, however. Because your profile indicates a New York location, I assume that you're in the United States. In that case, I know of exactly one offering in that domain. Perhaps they will or won't fit your needs (I've never worked with it myself), but NexTech certainly has a commercial product offering in that general market segment.

2. If you choose to build your own (which is always a possibility), be aware of the fact that there are legal requirements that surround such software. Once again, I'm not aware of specifics, but you may need to talk with the owner of the practice to ensure that your software doesn't violate any relevant privacy laws.

Answer 4

I know Epic is a big player in this area, but they may be out of your price range.

Answer 5

I can think of these options:

1. XMLFO
2. Mail-Merge with MS Word

Answer 6

With the risk of being shot, but: That sounds like something that Microsoft Access was created for. You can easily generate the Form and Report. If you really need it as a Word Document (as opposed to simply using Access' Report function) you can link Word Documents to Access databases.

Just an idea.