Many surgeons have the same way of beginning and ending their op reports. If you have many surgeons that say the same exact thing in these paragraphs, you might like this....another one I got from someone out there, I don't know who! It's nice, really nice.

First three letters of the doctor's name, then beg.

Dr. Joe Blow would be blobeg as the shortform, and that would expand his same old same old beginning paragraph.

Similarly, bloend would expand his same old same old ending paragraph!

I use very much the same setup, except I would put a q prefix on the short to indicate that this is an entry from my "quote" library.
:tonks

Posted by Mary Anne and manually moved by Harrie

I do this, also, but not just for ops. I do it for H&Ps, consults, or anything else that I can detect a pattern. Sometimes it may be just a shell format for the HP/consult, with a marker (I use * and have a search/replace macro just for that) to indicate where to start. Often the much of a system review or physical can be pre-programmed, as well.

Since it is quicker in shorthand to import the "template", I do that. I think I wrote the instructions for using shorthand to import a file somewhere else.

For ops, I often will have several different ones for a doctor, especially procedures like laparoscopic cholecystectomies or appys, tubal ligations, cesarean sections, cystos, etc., as well as having a general opening/ending. Gastric procedures are also great for making this type of report.

(Hint: If you have a doctor who may uses an occasional rare term, unique to him/her, put that term at the bottom of the report so you can reference if if you need to. It is usually one of those hard to understand phrases or words, then you don't spend time looking it up or figuring it out again. You can always delete it before you finish the report. )

This is a case where I personally find a normal file to be more useful than an expander, largely because I can call the normal up and edit it side by side with the report I'm working on. Once I've really perfected a normal, I do add it to my expander to save keystrokes. It takes several steps to replace the normal in DocQscribe and can be a bit of a time-consuming pain; that's why I only enter the normal after I've done a number of dictations for the same dictator and work type and know that I've created as nearly perfect a normal as possible. Do remember that I'm using the DocQscribe version of AutoCorrect [not to be confused with Word's AutoCorrect and all its limitations]; I haven't switched to Instant Text yet, so I don't know whether it's easy to modify an established Instant Text expansion.

I create my normals in Notepad since that's the only format that can be dropped into a DocQscribe report without potentially messing up the formatting. Then I have a series of desktop files where I store the normals for each account. There are folders and subfolders within these files to sort the normals alphabetically by dictator last name.

To call them up easily while I'm in the report, I have my taskbar [at the bottom of the screen] set up so I can access the file directory with one click:

Right-click on the toolbar area, choose Toolbars, then New Toolbar, then choose the desktop file you want. The name of the file will appear on your taskbar; click on the >> symbol, and a scrollable menu will pop up listing all the alphabetical subfolders. All I have to do is mouse over the appropriate letter of the alphabet, and all the normals stored in that subfolder appear. When I click on the name of a particular normal, a new window opens containing the Notepad file of the appropriate normal, ready to cut and paste into a new report or edit for inclusion in my expander.

A more thorough discussion of this idea can be found on my forum, including a screenshot that shows how the system looks in action.

Just bringing this up because it's also great for radiology. So many radiologists have the exact same wording for their "techniques" or "procedures" before they do the findings of a CT scan or MRI, or other studies. So simply using the doc's initials and "tech" behind them, or whatever way works best for your brain, can really be helpful.