After you perform an ECG exam and analyze the results, what do you do with your diagnosis?
Some of the doctors write it down manually in the patient’s file while others use their clinic management system to keep the information in a digital form.
In this post, I want to introduce a better, more streamlined way of saving your diagnosis with Beecardia.
We’ve recently added a new “Diagnosis” tab to the study page which has three components:
- Measurements - a way to save the interval measurements into the corresponding diagnosis fields automatically. It saves valuable time and avoids mistakes caused by manual copying. While you can easily copy the wrong value or switch between measurements, the new diagnosis tab will automatically get pre-filled with your measurements to avoid those issues
- Conclusions - the place for your findings, recommendations, etc. When you see the same patient after some time, you can look in his diagnosis to read your conclusions and get the full ECG from his last exam along with all of his ECG history
- Tags - mark and filter your studies. You can use tags to add metadata to your exams and find similar exams
Using Beecardia’s diagnosis tools will help you to save your analysis faster with less room for mistakes. On top of that, you’ll be able to filter your studies in a better way, and generating a PDF report will become easier.
When creating a diagnosis you usually start from measurements with the digital calipers tool. You can now directly save the results into the corresponding diagnosis fields.
For example, I’ve measured R to R and saved it as HR. The Diagnosis tab will automatically show all the values that you’ve saved so you don’t have to manually copy all the measurements into your diagnosis, the system will do it for you.
The next thing would be to add your findings, recommendations, etc. You can do it in the “Conclusions” field.
In many cases, doctors will write the same text over and over for similar ECG diagnoses, that’s why we’ve added support for pre-defined templates that you can add into the conclusions.
You can define templates under the report settings.
For example, I’ve set the “Normal ECG” template to “This is a normal ECG. The heart is beating in a regular sinus rhythm. All the important intervals are within normal ranges”. Now I can use this template in the diagnosis tab and quickly add it to my conclusions when needed.
You can also mark a template with a star to make it the default one. The default template will automatically get pre-filled for every new conclusion.
After filling in the measurements and the conclusions, you can add diagnosis tags, that allow you to mark and filter your studies.
For example, clicking on the avb tag will show all of your studies that were marked with avb.
You can also use the three dots to the right to select tags from a pre-defined list of ECG diagnosis tags.
Tags are a powerful way to add semantic metadata to your studies. It can be used to easily see other cases that share similar attributes.
Now that you have a diagnosis saved, creating a report becomes much easier as the report will automatically get pre-filled with your saved diagnosis.
If you want to keep the report or the diagnosis in an external patient file (in another software or in a physical form), you can either keep a link to Beecardia study page in that system or download/print the report as a pdf file.
In conclusion, using Beecardia to save your diagnosis will make the process faster and more efficient, and will reduce mistakes. Saving the patient diagnosis in the context of their ECG exam will allow you to view the medical history, helping with follow-up diagnosis. and will help to provide better heartcare for your patients.