I have a use-case where the user (a nurse) has to enter case-notes which is a paragraph of free-format text in a box. But to speed things up, auto-complete is proposed to be offered for certain elements e.g. Drug names.
e.g.
Patient John Doe was prescribed Amoxicylin 500 mg"
Here on typing Amox (say 4 chars) the drop down would somehow pop up and allow the nurse to select the Drug he wants.
So this doesn't fit the paradigm of a conventional drop down list nor a single Auto-complete Text Box. Most of the text is free-form text without any auto-complete. Only on specific words auto-complete is offered.
I was just wondering if such a thing has a name so that I can look up designs, implementation etc. Or just any links to other products that use this, or any libraries / widgets / toolkits that facilitate the implementation.
I don't want to re-invent the wheel and also want to avoid any pitfalls.
Suggestions?
My thoughts:
- Selecting with a Tab or something like it would be convenient than forcing a mouse select.
- Popping up only after a good match would be key to avoid false
positive pop-ups. e.g. A pop up on typing
Amox
is good butamo
would be annoying since he may be entering "among" or something like that which isn't a Drug Name. - A more accurate way might be to pop up not after a fixed number of matching characters entered in a word but only after the number of matches on a regular wordlist is low but has a match on the Drug Word List.
- There's so many uncommon words that this last option might be best implimented using a wordlist with frequency of usage in a common corpus or a medical corpus? e.g. If a word is matching frequently used words don't pop up yet, only pop up at the stage where there's one or more matches on the drug list but very few on the frequent commonly used words list
- A brute force, relatively dumb way to do this might be pre-agreed keywords that trigger a popup. i.e. Rx produces a pop up as the next word. e.g.
Patient John Doe Rx Amoxicylin 500 mg