Storage of medical records etc

Vitor

- So its back to the drawing board -

Have you considered using Airtable to organise and search the data? Seems it can assimilate up to 10,000 files from Google Drive - Airtable Sync Integration Google Drive | Airtable Support

MouldyOldDough

Vitor said:

- So its back to the drawing board -

Have you considered using Airtable to organise and search the data? Seems it can assimilate up to 10,000 files from Google Drive - Airtable Sync Integration Google Drive | Airtable Support

I looked at this and don't think that I come under the "free" category - due to size if not number of documents

Can I simply create a list on Excel with ATTACHMENTS (The actual documents rather  than shortcuts to the documents) ?

With fields from A1 to E13500 - Which would allow for 5 attached docs on every date in the last 35 years !!

1. How do I fill the first column automatically with dates ?

Heedtheadvice

You can add attachments rather than links, why do you want to do that though? See https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/insert-an-object-in-your-excel-spreadsheet-e73867b2-2988-4116-8d85-f5769ea435ba for how to doing it .....manually!!

Dates see instructions at https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/create-a-list-of-sequential-dates-aa1c0fa7-c76a-4762-8bc9-46f1691defec - I would start at  cell A2 though to allow column title in A1.

Some task to add your records though....and without making a mistake!!

Plus you may want to think about the logic behind how you allocate a date for each doc? E.g. it could be 'incident' date, appointment, document date, admission,   discharge, results, test etc ( plus lots of other useful content such as location, subject...a whole host of things,) as might be pertinent if you wanted to search for something in particular.

poppellerant

If all you need are files stored in chronological order, then you don't need software - just a bit a patience.  All you need to do is use an external drive and create folders on that.  Start with the years and create folders such as 1990, 1991, etc.  Then in one year create monthly folders, but by number, not name - this way you can sort the folders.  After that, just create folders for the required days in each month.

I admit it's going to be slow - you could probably make all the folders for one year, then copy these across to rest of the years - but delete the occasional days for where there is a leap year.

I would never ever trust cloud storage for personal files, more-so for medical records.  Keep them where you know they are safe.

You might also want to consider whether you want to use an external hard drive, an external USB stick or both - to be honest, I'd consider both for security. 

Heedtheadvice

and to add to props good post..

You can include some relevant info in the file titles and use inbuilt OS search facilities to find extra data you might fi d of interest not just in file names but contents too.......

Maybe not contents if pdf files come to think of it....

outtatune

poppellerant said:

If all you need are files stored in chronological order, then you don't need software - just a bit a patience.  All you need to do is use an external drive and create folders on that.  Start with the years and create folders such as 1990, 1991, etc.  Then in one year create monthly folders, but by number, not name - this way you can sort the folders.  After that, just create folders for the required days in each month.

I admit it's going to be slow - you could probably make all the folders for one year, then copy these across to rest of the years - but delete the occasional days for where there is a leap year.

I would never ever trust cloud storage for personal files, more-so for medical records.  Keep them where you know they are safe.

You might also want to consider whether you want to use an external hard drive, an external USB stick or both - to be honest, I'd consider both for security. 

If you do this then it's probably easiest to use Excel to generate the folder names automatically. You can even use it to create the appropriate 'MD ' commands that you can copy into a batch file to run from the command line.

If you don't have Excel I'm sure free alternatives like LibreOffice have the necessary functions to do the same thing.

MouldyOldDough

outtatune said:

poppellerant said:

If all you need are files stored in chronological order, then you don't need software - just a bit a patience.  All you need to do is use an external drive and create folders on that.  Start with the years and create folders such as 1990, 1991, etc.  Then in one year create monthly folders, but by number, not name - this way you can sort the folders.  After that, just create folders for the required days in each month.

I admit it's going to be slow - you could probably make all the folders for one year, then copy these across to rest of the years - but delete the occasional days for where there is a leap year.

I would never ever trust cloud storage for personal files, more-so for medical records.  Keep them where you know they are safe.

You might also want to consider whether you want to use an external hard drive, an external USB stick or both - to be honest, I'd consider both for security. 

If you do this then it's probably easiest to use Excel to generate the folder names automatically. You can even use it to create the appropriate 'MD ' commands that you can copy into a batch file to run from the command line.

If you don't have Excel I'm sure free alternatives like LibreOffice have the necessary functions to do the same thing.

I have used excel to create the folders , all 13,000 of them ( 35 years worth of days) and am proceeding to drag and drop files 

twopenny

I've got mine in hard copy!

10yrs, 2 doctors, 7 physios now we only have a doctor who gets booked for the day by the business run surgery.

Returning after the pandemic my records had been lost as the hospital updated the system.

Indeed I wouldn't expect anyone to get a grip on what happened over that time.

I then summarised on a word doc it so both I could remember the sequence, timescale and I could relate to whoever I needed to speak to in a succinct way.

Didn't take as long as I thought.

Wouldn't trust leaving it in the cloud since it's just a machine somewhere and it's been known to not cough up the info it's been fed.

MouldyOldDough

Heedtheadvice said:

and to add to props good post..

You can include some relevant info in the file titles and use inbuilt OS search facilities to find extra data you might fi d of interest not just in file names but contents too.......

Maybe not contents if pdf files come to think of it....

They are all (mostly handwritten by doctors !) PDF's and won't convert to TXT or anything else more meaningful so SEARCH will not work !

MouldyOldDough

Next problem - how do I sort the list of 13248 folders into a more user friendly order ?

ie) Actual date order - from 01 Jan 89 to 31 Dec 25

At the moment - it's alphabetical which means tons of work !

The option doesn't appear to exist