So I have been shanghaied into compiling some data for a study and recently learned that one of the variables was wrong on every single patient we'd registered, meaning we (I) had to look up every single patient by patient code in a national registry, find their national ID-number (which couldn't be stored in a more accessible form due to privacy laws etc), go into their health records and find the correct values. The registry is very informative but it is also extremely frustrating and the workflow requires switching windows multiple times as well as a very large number of clicks. After a frustrating half hour of clicking back and forth I finally flipped and decided there had to be a way to minimise the number of clicks using javascript. It took much longer than it should have (because I haven't used javascript in a long time and had no idea about callbacks, because the site isn't mine and because of Satan the great Accuser and Prince of Darkness) but now I can just use Ctrl+F to have the site's own search box open up with the right input field already focused, the irrelevant fields hidden and the text a more legible size. I'm fairly sure I can tweak it to go straight to the full data view from the search box instead of having to click one more time on the search result, and by the time my own work begins I should be able to fairly easily launch a more useful initial presentation of a patient's data. It's way past my bedtime but I'm almost happy the site was so horrible :o
