medlovers.com

    Recently i'm in one of those 'Ready for Work' program thingy for international medical graduates who plan to work in South Australia. We (IMG) will spend 4 weeks attaching to different wards, followed by tutorials. it is supposed to help us to get familiarised with the health system here. So i have to get up early and report to the intern at 8am everyday (weekday of course, i'm not getting paid!) Since i'm not insured to practice, i can't touch patient, not even doing a harmless examination of finger nails.. (i got very stern warning from the HR people on the first day for asking whether i'm allowed to fo physical examination on the patients.) I'm not complaining either as i don't have to pay to join this program.:P

    There are quite a lot of new things to learn, and to get used to. The most challenging thing for me, though, is to understand the Aussie english, which is very different from Malaysian english. It is really not too bad 95% of the time, but for the rest of the 5%, you just wish you have ears the size of Dumbo, or developing the urge to snatch the hearing aid from the patient..

    One day, there was this old lady, Mrs B with acute exacerbation of COAD. She was telling the the consultant ' I WANT TO GO HOME TO DIE.'.. Being a chinese with typical chinese up bringing and 5000 years of chinese values so deeply instilled in me, i thought that Mrs B's request made sense. Everyone likes to die at home given the choice. Then i noticed something weird. How come the consultant and registrar were telling her that it's OK and they'll arrange for it?! Only much later i realised that she was saying ' TODAY' and not 'TO DIE'….

    Luckily the team i was attached to was cool. I was spared the honor of being the laughing stock.
    2 more weeks in wards. Let's see what will happen next.

Finally! The solution to problems like having to call someone who is a room away with selective hearing deficit, or wanting someone waiting outside the fitting room to pick up another dress on the shelf for you to try, or keeping the communication when 2 people are heading for different  stores in the same mall etc… without resorting to expensive mobile phone calls/text which sometimes can frustrate you with poor reception, or a loud speaker.

I am a pack rat. I like to accumulate junk, whether they are dead electronic gadgets, or just paper documents. I am like one of those people who starts of with a 20MB hard disk, thinking it would never fill up, and finally end up filling over 200GB of “stuff”… some from a long time ago. My gmail account, for example, has over 1000 unread junk which I never quite sorted out. That's on top of the thousands of emails I have read but never sorted or deleted… (I do sometimes report spam and delete the adverts).

We live in an information age. I believe that the key to success in this age lies in knowledge management. The knowledge is out there. You have wikipedia, google… and for doctors, emedicine, harrison online, countless journals, etc.. And then, there's the printed materials: lecture notes, newspapers, books, magazines, etc.. The problem? Limited time, lots of junk to sieve through. And then? Retaining the important stuff — AND the ability to retrieve them (and remember about them) when the time comes.

In that big picture, somewhere, lies document management. For example, having all my notes from medical school years is great. But actually being able to find the information I need, and/or storing them neatly has always been a problem. Or, having 10 textbook of medicine is great, but which one did I read about this or that fact?

I do not know if there is an answer to this question. But then, I'll continue my search… and I'll document some of the things I find or have used along the way…

Just stumbled across this today: http://djvu.org/ and made me feel like I just smoked crack :P.

With djvu, you can attain 10X smaller file sizes than with JPEG! This is amazing! I have already looked at one of the files scanned and saved as a djvu file. Only 8MB and it has about 350+ pages of grayscale/colour in high quality! I have been using Paperport, scanning to PDF (with presumably JPEG images of the scanned pages embedded in the PDF). The file sizes have often been huge, even if in Black and White (presumably TIFF files embedded in the PDF), closer to 20+MB for 300 pages of black and white.

Furthermore, it seems that companies such as Scan Station and Document Express both can do Paperport Pro with Omnipage does best — make searchable documents. That is, after you scan in your paper documents, it will also recognise the text (OCR) and then embedded those information in the PDF or djvu files, so that you can search for the text in the resulting file. This way, you can quickly locate the files you need in the future! Of course, both of those programs are a lot more expensive than a simple Paperport Pro… but to make searchable PDFs, you need Omnipage Pro as well which isn't cheap either.

To test djvu, you can download the older version of Document Express (djvu solo) for free here. Or the web browser plug-in here. Or if you received djvu files and need to convert them to PDF, you can try this viewer and ask to export to PDF…

I'm checking it out myself! Hee… feeling geeky…