Having a Practice

I never thought that having one’s own practice would be so much fun. That’s not to say I think it to be easy. I would hardly say “I’m successful” as of yet.  As with any new business, it can sink or swim.  I’d like to thinkthat we have something good going here and we’re growing so we are doing something right (despite the economy that has a lot of people spooked). One of the things that have been the hardest to implement is EHR (Electronic Health Records) software. We use Compulink Advantage. It is a pretty robust EHR system. I have found that my programming skills have really come in handy, particularly when customizing screens with specialized scripts or when automating a certain function. In my pursuit of laziness, I have been able to automate certain things using AutoIt. AutoIt is a system administrator’s scripting language that can simulate keystrokes and mouse clicks. This came in handy when deleting dead inventory entries. Unfortunately Compulink’s Frame Inventory doesn’t have anything to delete entries en masse. You have to delete them one by one. Well when fooling around with the frames data and Compulink’s inventory I added about 13000 entries into my Inventory database. None of which had any history associated with them, but made it very difficult to search for frames when selling glasses. So, if I wanted to delete these entries. I would have to hit Alt “D” {Enter} {Enter} 13000 times. That’s a bit tedious. I’m also not that fast. Well the following script helped me get rid of them in about two hours. You would just have to hold down the {Enter} button once it starts. Hit Escape to get out of the program.

Global $Paused
HotKeySet("{PAUSE}", "TogglePause")
HotKeySet("{ESC}", "MyExit")
HotKeySet ("!x", "MyExit")
;;;; Body of program would go here;;;;
While 1
	MsgBox(1, "Beginning Delete Cycle", "Beginning Delete Cycle")	
    DeleteFromCompulink()
	MsgBox(1, "End Delete Cycle", "End Delete Cycle")
	sleep(5)
WEnd
;;;;;;;;

Func TogglePause()
    $Paused = Not $Paused
    While $Paused
        sleep(1000)
        ToolTip('Script is "Paused"',0,0)
    WEnd
    ToolTip("")
EndFunc  ;==>TogglePause

Func DeleteFromCompulink()
	Send("!d")
	Send("{ENTER}")
	Send("{ENTER}")
EndFunc

Func MyExit()
	Exit
EndFunc

Func Terminate()
    Exit 0
EndFunc  ;==>Terminate