A WYSIWYG template designer for medical report systems

Medical examinations and tests are key procedures in clinical practice. Various kinds of medical report systems have been implemented in hospitals today. Most of these systems provide a template-based report editing approach for physicians to customize the content and layout of patient report. But designing such a report template and associating it with underlying database schema is always time-consuming and requires much computer skills. This paper brings forward to design a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) template designer for medical report template designing. Firstly, the whole process of designing template is analyzed in detail to find out the problem. Then a WYSIWYG template designer is designed with a visualized component library as the core module, in which 39 visualized components are designed as the elementary units of template and report. Each of these components provides specially designed attributes and operations. Finally, a template designer application and a medical report editor tool are developed based on the visualized component library. Practice shows that physicians can design customized template without much computer skill training and the working time is shortened to a great extent with the WYSIWYG template designer.