Capturing cases

The fastest way to log a case is: type the name and MRN, dictate the notes, tap Capture. The app sorts out the structure (procedure, side, role) on its own.

The capture form

Patient name and MRN — at the top. Required, typed manually.
Notes — the main field. Type or dictate. The app reads your notes to fill in everything else.
Microphone — next to the Notes label. Tap to record; tap again to stop. The recording is transcribed on your phone — no audio is sent anywhere.
Add details — an expander for procedure, side, anatomical site, role. The app fills these from your notes if you don’t.

Dictating well

A workable dictation:

“TKR right knee for severe OA in a 65-year-old man. Tourniquet 90 minutes. Cemented Stryker Triathlon. Primary surgeon. Slightly difficult exposure due to obesity. Independent.”

Tips:

Say the structure first — “right knee TKR” before the long description. If transcription loses the tail, the important fields still land.
Read the transcript before you tap Capture. The transcription is good but not perfect, especially for unusual medical terms. Edit anything wrong before submitting.
Say numbers as words — “ninety minutes” works better than “9-0 minutes”.
Operative times are picked up too. If you say start and finish times (“started 9:15, finished 10:45”) or a duration (“took about ninety minutes”), the app fills the case’s operative time for you. These are clinical times only — your earnings are never dictated.
Two seconds of silence stops the recording. If you pause to think, the recording ends — tap the microphone again to continue. The transcript appends where your cursor is.
30-second cap per recording. For longer dictations, stop and start again.

What happens after you tap Capture

The case appears on your case list straight away.
In the background, the app reads your notes and fills in the procedure, side, role, and any clinical findings you mentioned. If you said the patient’s age or sex (“a 65-year-old man”), those are picked up too and shown quietly on the case — like everything else about a patient, they’re encrypted on your device before they leave.
If the app is unsure about anything important, it asks you on the case page. Answer there — no separate review queue.

Procedure matching

The app matches the procedure name from your notes against a curated list of procedures. If the match is exact, it fills the procedure field automatically. If it’s not exact, you’ll see the top three closest matches as options — tap one to lock it in. If none fit, type your own.

This matters: two surgeons dictating “ORIF distal radius” should end up on the same canonical procedure, so case statistics across surgeons stay consistent. The app is strict on purpose.

Procedure names on imported cases

When you import a spreadsheet, the procedure names in it are usually the hospital’s billing wording — “ORTHO ORIF FRACTURE PKG” rather than the clinical name. In the background, the app matches each of these names to its standard procedure list, so your imported cases read like a clinical record and count properly in your case mix.

Three things to know:

The hospital’s original wording is always kept. A matched case shows the standard procedure name, with the original line beneath it in grey: recorded by hospital as: ORTHO ORIF FRACTURE PKG. Nothing is ever silently replaced.
If a match is wrong, fix it from the case. Open the case, tap the procedure, and pick the right one from the list. The app then asks how far your fix should reach — this case only, or all your cases recorded under that billing name. More on the choice below.
If the app isn’t sure, it doesn’t guess. A name it can’t confidently match is simply left exactly as the hospital recorded it. The import summary tells you how it went: “41 of 43 procedure names matched automatically · 2 left as recorded.” A glance, not a gate — nothing waits on you.

Procedure names you’ve set yourself are never changed by any of this. Your wording always wins, on imported cases too.

Which version wins?

Sometimes two sources describe the same case differently — your own logbook says “ORIF distal radius”, the hospital’s billing sheet says “ORTHO ORIF FRACTURE PKG”. The rule is simple, and it always favours the surgeon:

Anything you typed or dictated yourself is never changed by an import. Not by your own logbook, not by a hospital sheet. Ever.
Your own logbook beats billing wording — automatically. When you import an eLogbook export or your personal Excel sheet over cases that originally came from a hospital billing sheet, your wording for the procedure, side, and site quietly replaces the billing version on the matched cases — no question asked per case. The preview tells you how many cases will be updated, and the new name is matched against the standard procedure list just like any other.
Two of your own records that disagree ask you. If a case already carries your wording — typed in, or from an earlier logbook of yours — and a new sheet of yours says something different, that’s a real disagreement, and you settle it with one tap.

Re-importing the same logbook again changes nothing — once your wording is on a case, it stays. None of this affects how a case gets confirmed: confirmation still comes only from a hospital settlement sheet, however good your own logbook’s wording is.

What the case list shows

Your case list shows the matched procedure name — the standard clinical name, shown plainly, because a matched case is the normal state. A billing name the app couldn’t match stays exactly as the hospital wrote it and appears dimmed, so the few unmatched ones stand out at a glance instead of hiding among hundreds of cases. The list itself is for reading only; to fix a name, open the case.

Reviewing your procedure names

Four years of imports usually come down to a few dozen distinct billing names — so the quickest way to audit your record is by name, not case by case. Settings → Procedures lists every billing name from your hospitals, side by side with:

the procedure it maps to,
how many of your cases it covers, and
how it was set — matched automatically, set by you, or set by a colleague at your hospital.

The screen is split into two lists. It opens on Unmatched — the billing names that still need your eye — with Matched collapsed beneath it. The counts in the two headings tell you how much is left, so you can stop a review halfway and pick up later exactly where you left off. The moment you confirm or correct a name, it moves to Matched. When Unmatched reaches zero, you’re done — new names appear there only after your next import.

Suggested matches. When the app isn’t sure enough about a match, it does not apply it to your cases. The name waits in Unmatched with the app’s best suggestion pre-filled. One tap confirms the suggestion — and fills in the cases that were waiting on it — or you can pick a different procedure instead. Either way, nothing touches your cases until you decide.

“Auto-matched — check it.” Names the app matched automatically before this update appear once in Unmatched for a quick look-over. Your cases keep their match the whole time — confirming just tells the app you agree, and the name then stays in Matched for good. If a match is wrong, correct it — the fix reaches every case recorded under that name, as always. Names you set yourself, and names matched from your own dictionary, don’t need re-checking and stay in Matched.

Tap a name to correct it. A correction made from this screen always applies to all of your cases recorded under that billing name — the confirmation tells you exactly how many — and the same name matches correctly on every future import. One screen audits your whole history.

When one billing name means different operations

Some billing names are catch-alls. “K-WIRING OF ANY FRACTURE” might be a wrist one week and an ankle the next — there is no single right answer for it.

When you correct a case like that, choose “This case only.” That fixes the case in front of you without touching the others, and it teaches the app something important: this billing name varies by case. From then on the app stops matching it to a single procedure — future imports leave it as recorded (dimmed on your list) so you can set each case yourself, and Settings → Procedures shows it under Matched as varies by case, with a breakdown of which procedures your cases under that name actually were. It sits in Matched, not Unmatched, because there’s nothing pending on it — each case is set on its own.

Choose “All cases recorded as …” only when the billing name really does mean one procedure and the match was simply wrong.

When one billing name covers several procedures

Some billing names describe a combination — “ACL Reconstruction, ORTHO- Partial Meniscectomy” is two procedures in one sitting, every time. In Settings → Procedures you can map a name like that to all of them: the first procedure is the main one; add the others beneath it, just as you would on a case. Applying the correction then writes the complete set onto every case recorded under that name — the main procedure on your case list, the rest listed with it — and every future import gets the full set automatically.

This is the opposite of a catch-all: a combination name means the same set of procedures every time, while a catch-all means different things case by case — that one still shows varies by case and is fixed on each case.

As always, cases whose procedures you’ve set by hand yourself are never changed by a correction made here.

Age and sex from your hospital sheets

If your hospital sheet carries the patient’s age, sex, or date of birth, an import brings them in with the case. They appear quietly next to the patient’s name — on the case list and on the case page — as something like “45 · M”. Sex is shown exactly as your sheet recorded it; when a case has no age or sex recorded, nothing is shown at all.

Already imported your sheets before this existed? Re-import the same files once: existing cases fill in their missing age and sex, and nothing you have entered is ever overwritten or duplicated.

Importing a logbook without patient names

Many surgeons keep a personal logbook — an eLogbook export, or their own Excel sheet — that records the hospital number (MRN), date, and operation, but no patient names. These import fine. Each case comes in with its MRN and shows as “Unnamed” on your case list; nothing is made up to fill the gap.

The names arrive later, on their own: when you import a hospital settlement sheet that covers the same patients, the app matches each case by its MRN, fills in the name, and confirms the case at the same time. The import preview tells you up front how many cases will come in unnamed, so there are no surprises.

Editing a case

Open a case → tap Edit in the top right. Change anything; tap Save. The original values are kept in history (open the … menu).

Two things to know in edit mode:

The microphone next to Notes works the same as on capture. Transcripts append at your cursor, not at the end.
The Extract fields from notes button re-runs the auto-fill over your latest text. If you edited the notes, the app saves them first so the fresh text gets read.

Combined operations — more than one procedure in a sitting

Some cases are more than one operation under the same anaesthetic — an ORIF distal radius with a carpal tunnel release, say. A case can record all of them.

The first procedure is the main one. It’s the name your case list shows and the one your numbers count. The others are listed beneath it on the case page.
Add or remove procedures from the case page. Open the case and use Add procedure in the procedures section — you pick from the same procedure list as always. Each procedure has its own remove control.
Removing the main procedure promotes the next one. Delete the first and the procedure below it becomes the main one. A case always keeps at least one procedure this way.
Side is asked per procedure, when it matters. If a procedure needs a side (left, right, bilateral), the case page asks for it on that procedure — so a right wrist and a left knee in the same sitting each carry their own side.
On the case list, extra procedures show as “+N more” next to the main procedure’s name. The full list is on the case page, one tap away.

A note on bilateral operations, since they come up: if the procedure list has a combined bilateral entry (bilateral TKR, for instance), record it as one procedure marked bilateral. If it doesn’t — two trigger finger releases on different hands, say — record two procedures, each with its own side. And an operation staged over two sittings on different days is two cases, not one: a case is one patient, one sitting, one date.

Procedures you add or rearrange yourself are yours — the automatic matching described above never changes them.

Recording earnings per case

If you don’t have a hospital settlement spreadsheet — cash work, private practice, or a posting where you only keep a case list — you can record earnings on the case itself. Open a case and use the Financials section to enter:

Generated — the total bill for the case.
Surgeon fee — your take-home. You can type the amount directly, or enter a percentage and let the app work it out.

The app remembers your usual ratio per hospital and pre-fills the fee when you type Generated; change it any time. Both numbers are typed, not dictated — money never goes through voice — and they are encrypted on your device before they leave. The currency follows the hospital, so you never pick it.

These figures power a Light Fair Return view under Insights → Fair return: your earnings, earnings per hour (when you’ve also recorded operative time), and the effective percentage you keep — each shown with how many of your cases it was computed from. If a hospital later sends an authoritative settlement sheet, that sheet’s figures take over for that period.

The Financials section appears for consultant postings. If you’ve marked a hospital as a training post, it stays hidden there. Set your role per hospital under Settings → Hospitals.

Adding a hospital — how the list is scoped

When you add a hospital under Settings → Hospitals, the search list shows hospitals where you are. The app works out your country automatically — from your phone’s timezone, and from your connection when you’re on the live app — so you don’t have to pick one. The country is shown above the search box: “Hospitals in Oman”.

If you’re adding a hospital somewhere else — a visiting post, a locum abroad, a new posting in another country — tap change next to that line and choose the right country. The list, and the hospital you add, then belong to that country. This keeps the currency and the matching correct, so a hospital you add while travelling isn’t filed under your home country by mistake.

You only need to tap change when the hospital is somewhere other than where you are right now. The rest of the time the right country is already chosen.

What doesn’t work yet

A live transcript while you speak. The transcript appears all at once when you stop.
Long-form dictation beyond 30 seconds in one go.

To bring in a backlog of past cases, you can import a spreadsheet — see the Import a spreadsheet link on your case list. Cases that come from a hospital settlement sheet are confirmed on import; the rest get re-checked automatically the next time an authoritative sheet arrives (or when you tap Re-verify now in Settings), so confirmation keeps catching up over time rather than happening only once.

If you start a capture and navigate away before tapping Capture, the form is cleared. Capture in one go.