Mednote: a note-taking app that builds a medical ontology while you use it

Introduction

Mednote is a lightweight medical note-taking app that builds a medical ontology while you use it. I built this and used it during medical school when trying to organize the vast differentials and arrays of supporting evidence for different diagnoses.

This web-based app has an interface similar to Evernote. Users can create a page to take notes on a particular concept, like 'chest pain'. Within the body of the text, users denote relationships with other medical terms, which gets extracted from the text and placed into the sidebar. As you build pages and connections, linkages develop, allowing you to navigate back and forth between concepts. On the 'chest pain' page, as an emergent property, you can see the different causes, and recommendations on which examinations or tests to run to differentiate them.

Source code

Open source

https://bitbucket.org/davehdo/mednote2

Technologies

Ruby on Rails

The index of terms

The chest pain page

The differential diagnosis for chest pain is inferred from the body of the text