Lotus 123 for Doctors

I have discovered a couple of uses for Lotus. First, I keep a spreadsheet for each patient I have in Intensive Care. The spreadsheet has places to enter all their lab test values, and this allows me to follow trends in electrolytes and fluid balance. A plot of selected ranges in the data can be most enlightening for planning the course of treatment, and trends developing over weeks can easily be detected and corrected before they reach critical proportions. For example, slow alterations in potassium levels and I/O can be easily seen when plotted as a graph, yielding a better understanding of the patient's status.

1-2-3 Lab Test: Graphic

 The second use for Lotus is as a look-up table for drip rates according to dosage for a variety of cardioactive drugs. It is easy to make a simple mistake in arithmetic that would be trivial in another professions, but disastrous or even fatal when you're dealing with critically ill human beings. This spreadsheet allows me to be confident, even at two a.m., that I am not making any stupid mistakes. It is quicker than doing it by hand, too.

I have just finished a third use for Lotus. It is a drug interaction database that will find conflicts when I type in a list of patient medications. I have the data imported on over 810 different drug interactions, but still have the programming and macro automation to do.

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