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Comment by phobosanomaly | Hacker News Reader

Thank you very much for sharing that. I'll look into it more. The clinicians (head of trauma Evidence-Based Medicine as well as the head of the trauma department overall) I have talked to at my non-academic Level II trauma center do not have any clue this exists. They are currently exporting thousands of records by hand.

Edit: Do you know offhand of a good guide to SlicerDicer I can share with them? I will google around, but if you had something you personally liked?

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There's still likely some good reason to do that work manually. The quality of data entry into EMRs is often poor, especially when it comes to event or time data that's not just numeric bloodwork. Imagine that at a random physicals date your patient was suddenly was 155kg and 65cm tall. Or for another example, having someone be inaccurately be diagnosed as having new onset diabetes after transplant, despite them having DM for several years prior. People switch up entry fields, inaccurately assess or diagnose patients all the time--generally because of the sheer variety of ways in which data can be screwed up, only a person can notice those oddities (or write a little script to fix them).

At population levels I could concede that these errors may well be inconsequential though.

I work at Epic, so the resources I have are all internal training/document. That being said, the best way to learn it is probably to have someone who’s an expert in it, ideally another doctor, walk them through it. If you want, I can see if I can find some specific customer-facing documents/training to link them to.

Lack of public documentation has to be my #1 pain point with proprietary software over the years.

Especially in the EMR space, putting up barriers to access basic documentation is quite unreasonable.

Public documentation is not going to suddenly allow your competition to gain an advantage, while your own firm benefits from users being able to easily google and get authoritative answers from your own official documentation.

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