The idea for DragInfo for Kit Lots came to me the same way most of my ideas do: Out of frustration after wasting hours of time doing a tedious, repetitive task.  As part of a continuing effort to make our lab paperless, it was decided that we could eliminate several logbooks by appending each serology test with the respective serology kit lot and expiration date info.  Management happily tossed the old logbooks into storage, patted themselves on the back and moved on.  [ad name=”Google Adsense”]However the bench techs found that typing in “Kit Lot: RAND0M L3TT3RS AND NUMBERS” “Kit Expiration: 01/01/2024” “Cartridge Lot: …..” (you get the idea) for each and every test, enormously tedious.  In fact many techs began to avoid the Serology bench like the plague fearing a rush of sero tests from ER would trap them in an endless carpal tunnel loop.  My friend Toi came up with a brilliant idea, simply put a text file out on the shared drive with all the current lot information.  We could then cut and paste the info from the file to the comment box.

It was a great solution but still prone to user error and the quirkiness of Cerner over Citrix.  We discovered Citrix won’t let you right-click to paste,  Citrix won’t let you drag and drop, and Citrix windows aren’t real windows but virtual ones.  A GUI is inherently difficult to automate, but not impossible.  However I have found a Cerner GUI over Citrix to be nearly impossible to automate.
Still I eventually found a way to make drag-and-drop work in Citrix.  Drag-and-drop is easier and faster than cutting and pasting.  It is also less prone to user error which is very important in labs.

With DragInfo you can simply left-click anywhere on your text and plunk it into the Cerner comment window.
In addition  DragInfo saves it’s text snippets in an xml file that you can put on a shared drive.  This keeps you from having to update the info on multiple machines.  The interface is nice and intuitive.  You can also resize the window down to a tiny box and still navigate the text snippets easily.  It stays out of your way and is there when you need it.
DragInfo is also a great place to put disclaimers, addresses, and canned text.  I use it at home all the time to drag and drop my address, phone numbers, etc into web forms, email, word documents etc.  I hope you find it useful.  Let me know how you like it and add any suggestions you might have!
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