Great news! We now have hundreds of virtual patient cases spread across our various OpenLabyrinth servers on all sorts of topics.

The bad news is “we have hundreds of… all sorts of topics” – so how the heck do you find something that fits your needs? After all, you don’t want to write your own case, if someone else has already invented that wheel. Well, we have a number of things to help you out, and even more exciting, a number of powerful tools on the way. But we are also interested in your needs and perspectives on this, so please feel free to contact us if you have some suggestions on how to improve this.

Coming soon are some interesting capabilities, using semantic indexing, which should make our case materials much more discoverable.

The first tip that we have for our current users is that there are two simple Search tools in OpenLabyrinth. If you use the Search box in the top left corner of the main page (you must be logged in to see this), this will search labyrinth titles and the description field, which makes it much more flexible and will find a greater range of cases.

If you click on the menu Labyrinths | My Labyrinths, you will see a table of current cases on this server. This table can be sorted on a number of columns, which sometimes helps to find a case when you might remember roughly how recently you created it but cannot remember the name. There is also a search field within the table frame on the right side. This only searches by labyrinth title but will match any part of the title. It is also an iterative search and will start to show matching titles as soon as you have typed at least 3 characters.

More on finding cases shortly…