Adventures in telepsychiatry

One problem I still haven’t solved to my satisfaction is a good way to use Skype for telepsychiatry and take notes at the same time.

If you just have paper records, then this issue isn’t problematic-—you use the computer monitor for Skype, and your regular paper notes. However, my record keeping system is on line, and I need to get to it via my browser. (I use dokuwiki, free wiki software that runs on a server at my home. I keep a daily journal on the wiki of patient encounters and each patient has his or her own wiki page. When the patient comes in, I just put a date at the top of his or her wiki page and write my note. Very simple. Very easy to maintain. Every edit is logged and every previous version is kept. This plus nationalerx.com = free online EMR system that works very well for me. Setup time for dokuwiki for someone who knows how to manage a webserver and understands PHP: 10 minutes.)

The obvious way to solve the problem would be to devote half the screen to Skype and the other half to the browser. In Windows, the easy way to do that would be to tile the windows next to each other and go to work. Unfortunately, Skype doesn’t conform to Windows standards and allow you to resize the window are using, so the tiling commands in the operating system don’t help. I haven’t found an alternative to manually sizing the windows and placing them myself, which wastes a minute or so of my time doing something that should work in a second.

Although I wonder if this flaw in Skype has something to do with DirectX, it still seems that it wouldn’t be too much trouble to fix. Obviously, the Skype window, like any other, needs to be a certain size to be useful. On the other hand, it wouldn’t seem to be much more than a few lines of code to make Skype into a good Windows citizen.