Assuming 5-10 minutes per chart and an average ward size, an inpatient doctor spends 2-3 hours per week rewriting medication charts. During a 15-minute-per-patient pre-admission clinic, a doctor may be expected to write multiple medication charts in addition to their clinical assessment.
Auto Med Chart is a proof-of-concept tool that allows users to type a list of patient medications (or click common medications) and then generate a PDF file that can be printed directly onto the medication chart. The digital list can be saved locally and re-used when the medication chart needs to be rewritten.
Since its introduction in late 2018, this tool has been used hundreds of times. It has been of most benefit in the case of long-stay polypharmacy patients, as the overhead of using the tool is negligible compared to the time saved by printing charts. The tool has also been useful in surgical pre-admission clinic where standard post-operative orders such as analgesia, antiemetics, and aperients can now be pre-templated en masse.
The tool suffers from a finicky learning process because charts need to be oriented correctly in the printer tray and must be put through the printer twice.
