HyperCard Stories

Cool things our readers do with HyperCard

Peter M. Brigham, MD

Medical records, Gutenberg Reader, and toys!

I've been using Hypercard since I had a Mac. I've done all kinds of
stacks, some just for fun and to test out and develop my scripting skills, 
and some have turned out to be useful for myself and others. I've done
stacks to manage URL's, to extract and store bibliographic citations from
text files, to flexibly tag and manipulate text, to log drug interactions, 
to generate a medication schedule for withdrawing someone from valium, all 
the way down to silly things like a stack that tests to see if an anagram
is accurate. (Did you know that "That's one small step for a man, one giant
leap for mankind. -- Neil Armstrong" is an anagram of "Thin man
ran; makes a large stride, left planet, pins flag on moon! On to Mars!"?)

I designed the Hypercard FAQ stack, sectioning Peter Fleck's HC FAQ into
cards with a simple navigation system involving a clickable table of
contents, find capabilities, etc. -- a very simple stack, really, but
elegant enough that it has been around for some years now, and apparently
widely used. And what could be more appropriate than the HC FAQ in the
form of a stack?

I collaborated with Glen Bledsoe in revising his Gutenberg Reader stack,
cleaning up the scripting and using a couple of XFCN's to make it three
times faster. In case you're not familiar with it, it has been one of the
most widely used tools for reading and formatting freeware text from the
Gutenberg Project.

In my professional life (I'm a practicing psychiatrist) I've used
Hypercard in two major ways: to manage email (particularly the output from 
a high-volume mailing list) and to keep my patient records. The first is
done with a stack I started designing 10 years ago and have repeatedly
refined since. It allows me to import email messages wholesale from a
given folder, and reformat them with a few mouse clicks, and export them
as a formatted text file complete with table of contents. With this I have 
distributed a selected sampling of postings from a psychopharmacology
mailing list on a regular basis to the psychiatrists and prescribing psych 
nurses in a large HMO. I also use the stack to save all my personal email. 
I can also export the contents of the stack in a format readable by
Filemaker Pro -- so I have a 10 megabyte Filemaker archive of reference
postings on psychopharmacology.

My patient record stack is set up so I have a running record of notes on
every patient. Clicking on a button allows me to enter a note headed by
the patient's current medications and the procedure code for the visit.
Boilerplate text (when needed) is inserted with a keystroke. New
prescriptions are easily logged by filling in a few fields (with a lot of
automated filling in from the scripting), and med renewals are logged with 
a simple option-click on the current meds list. When a med is started or
discontinued, a separate card tracks all medications started and stopped,
with the dates and reason for discontinuation, etc. The group practice I
belong to keeps paper charts, so with the aid of the Reports add-on for
HC, a few clicks allow me to print out the last note, any given note in
the record, or a full patient record, complete with demographic info,
allergies, diagnoses, and current meds. And the practice letterhead
appears at the top. The result is that I can turn out an elegantly
formatted note in a couple minutes. Another click of a button exports a
summary of the active cases in my practice, with name, phone numbers,
ancillary contacts, diagnoses, and current meds -- so in a few minutes I
have a document I can hand over to a covering colleague when I go on
vacation.

Hypercard has allowed me to tweak these tools as my needs shift over time. 
I am *totally* attached to Hypercard. Apple is missing a *big* marketing
opportunity by letting it languish.

Comments to: Peter M. Brigham, MD