Any of you have experience with this ?

We have an application for the radiology dept. which holds patient history,
department statistics and that is also used to transcript/print/save the
results given by the radiologists (voice recorded on a phone system -
Dictaphone system actually; users listen to the recording and type the text
which goes into a flat file, the application saving the name of that file
to be able to access it later).

Because we just merged two hospitals into one (administratively speaking)
and have to adjust the application to be used by both, and also because
it's not Y2K compliant, we are in a phase of re-writing this application.
Along the way we would like to revamp the transcripting part (no word
processor here; as lines of text are written they are written to the flat
file). We have the option of bying the whole kit from Dictaphone (voice
recording + transcripting which uses Word; works on NT; requires an
interface on the hp3000 so that we can send it exam orders (requests) and
get back results confirmation) or working our own system.

I tried a few things. From the hp3000, i have been able to use Word as the
word processor, using OLE with the terminal emulator to do the link. It
works like this: a Reflection script  activated by the hp3000 launches Word
(if need be) and asks it to open a file (the filename is passed as a
parameter) which is created by the application on the hp3000 and contains
basic patient information (name, address, etc). The template used in Word
includes a script  related to the "document_close" event, to open a box to
confirm if the user wants to print the document, and at the end return
control to the Reflection window (which is named using the filename).

So far it looks good, but some things would have to be worked out: how to
print a day's full of work, sorted by some information contained in the
documents or in the application ?  Keep the files on the hp3000 using Samba
or on a NT server ? Would that be performant ? Does OLE require performant
PCs (i read something vague about it) ? Also, could we use Minisoft's
terminal emulator (instead of Reflection) since we have an unlimited
licence for it already, knowing that this emulator supports DDE and not OLE
? (i just tried to open a file using DDE; seems to work but we have to pass
WordBasic commands and i don't have documentation for those).

Any of you have experience with this sort of thing ?

I hope that you're not bored or discusted by the length of this message.
I'm a new user of the Listserver. My primary language is french, so i might
have made mispelling mistakes also.

Thanks in advance

Jean Cadoret, analyst-programmer,
Centre Hospitalier des Vallées de l'Outaouais (CHVO)  /  Outaouais Valley
Hospital
Hull, Québec, Canada
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