My last two months in the surgical ICU are almost up. Well I did have a good time in my rotation. Got to meet new people, new personalities. Had to force myself to read though. Its a welcome relief and I did learn much.
I was able to finally sift through and organize at last the SICU jungle of medical abstracts and updated journals. Something I'm really proud of since I personally have met with all the surgeons who have tried for the past 3 yrs (and failed bravely) to keep the files in a more or less user friendly format. Try dealing with 2.5 GB of data in 2.8million something files and you fairly get the idea. All this haphazardly dumped in more than 200 folders and linked and cross linked with each other. No wonder sometimes files just disappear under the tens of daily updates and uploads.
Now try searching for a specific article of interest.
The problem lay not just with record keeping. The more daunting task at hand is how to make all these life saving data available to just about anyone who knows how to use a keyboard. Yep. The answer lay in indexing. Search through individual files for certain keywords within each document and you have a prescription for masochism induced insanity.
In retrospect, the answer lay in front of me all the time. For how can one see the path when one is already walking it? Suffice it to say that I did have my share of sleepless nights (just two though), tweaking the files and putting them up in proper order.
That is my gift to the next SICU rotators.
A wealth of information literally at their fingertips. Now made accesible to anyone who knows how to type.
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