Monday, August 13, 2007

TimelineMaker for Healthcare

Filed under: Informatics , Medgadget Exclusive

There are times in a medical professional's career when situations come up that require complicated scheduling or reconstruction of a series of events onto a timeline. Patients with complicated medical histories, nursing stations that constantly have shift changes, doctor partnerships with on-call schedules, and administrators that want to reconstruct and study medical errors use spreadsheets like Excel or sometimes simply paper to map out timelines.

We toyed around and decided to review the TimelineMaker, a software package specifically designed to create clean looking timelines. What we immediately discovered was the simplicity of creating a simple timeline. Often software designed for a unique task becomes overly complicated as it attempts to do everything possible within that one task. And so in that sense TimelineMaker does not feel bulky for what it is. You quickly enter a series of events and details like time and place, click the button that generates the chart, and you automatically get a simple timeline. From here one can add details to the chart, move things around, add notes, and generally change the look and feel of the timeline. What is also interesting is that the application has a presentation mode similar to PowerPoint, which is fairly easy to manipulate, especially for anyone with any experience with things like PowerPoint. Combined with the printing capabilities, one can make quite a decent presentation with this app.

Its not all things to all people. This is a tool to make timelines and nothing else. But that it does well, and with relative ease to the user.

You can download a trial copy at TimelineMaker...

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