How To Create A Dot Phrase In Epic

spo01

Member

15+ Year Member

I've been trying to find a solution to this for over a year with no luck, maybe someone here can help!

With Epic EMR I was absolutely in love with the smart/dot phrases. For those who never used this, you would have all your custom templates saved and labeled and to get it to pop up while you're typing you would type "." and then the name of the template. It made notes so much easier and saved so much time. For instance, if I have a 2 paragraph explanation of diabetes and 2 paragraph explanation of a "plantar fasciitis" and I labeled them ".diabetes" and ".plantarfas" when I type ".di" then it would automatically appear and click enter followed by ".pl" and enter, and the templates pop up. My current EMR does not allow me to create custom templates that are too large and does not have this smartphrase feature.

Right now I have been copying and pasting from a microsoft word document but it just takes too much time going back and forth.

So dragon dictation has something very similar but instead of typing you obviously say the template and it pops up. This would be good but I prefer the dot phrases over verbal commands as I am a fast typer and don't want to pay for dragon.

Is there any way to do this? Maybe some downloadable app that lets you program keys or create dot phrases, or an external keyboard with ways to program templates/phrases into the keys?

: Nov 6, 2003

: 44,515

: 29,028

Found one that looks promising: AutoHotkey

It's free and open source software (FOSS) for Windows and looks super powerful. I think the feature you're looking for is the "hotstring" feature, where you define a string, and it automatically expands it as you type. I bet you could even use the same hotstrings like ".diabetes" and ".plantarfas"

Let me know if you try this out, and it works for you in practice, because I'm looking for a similar solution.

spo01

Member

15+ Year Member

Found one that looks promising: AutoHotkey

It's free and open source software (FOSS) for Windows and looks super powerful. I think the feature you're looking for is the "hotstring" feature, where you define a string, and it automatically expands it as you type. I bet you could even use the same hotstrings like ".diabetes" and ".plantarfas"

Let me know if you try this out, and it works for you in practice, because I'm looking for a similar solution.

Thanks a lot! I've been trying it and watching tutorials, so far it's promising...

spo01

Member

15+ Year Member

Found one that looks promising: AutoHotkey

It's free and open source software (FOSS) for Windows and looks super powerful. I think the feature you're looking for is the "hotstring" feature, where you define a string, and it automatically expands it as you type. I bet you could even use the same hotstrings like ".diabetes" and ".plantarfas"

Let me know if you try this out, and it works for you in practice, because I'm looking for a similar solution.

Update: I have successfully created and ran my own dot phrases exactly like I did in epic EMR and it's awesome. I have created a TON of templates w/o any problems at this time. Thanks again.

Reactions: 1 user

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: Nov 26, 2019

: 6

: 2

Attending Physician

Thanks for sharing. I'm interested in using this tool.
Do you mind sharing some resources on how to create the dot phrases?
Thank you!

rusheddoc

New Member

: Oct 3, 2020

: 1

: 0

Attending Physician

Hellostepwise

Theres also some youtube tutorials as to how to set it up.

You can set all the workflows from home computer, save to a USB and then just plug that in to work computer.