EMERSE Known Issues and Bugs

These notes cover known issues and bugs with the EMERSE system. Some, but not all, of these may be fixed in future releases.

If two EMERSE users are working simultaneously with the same patient from a common shared patient list, it is possible that one user’s Comment or Tag could over-write the other user’s Comment or Tag. Whoever edits the Comment/Tag most recently will have their Comment/Tag saved, and the prior one would be lost. There is currently no way for a user to know if another user is working on the same patient from the same shared patient list. Note that we are unaware of any situation in which this has ever happened, but it is theoretically possible.

The Internet Explorer (IE) browser has a 'Compatibility Mode' that allows it to work with older web-based applications, like some older clinical applications. EMERSE, however, works best with modern web browser functionality and aspects of EMERSE may be rendered non-functional when IE is set to use 'Compatibility Mode'. There are no plans to remedy this issue since newer versions of IE are more standards-compliant and the need for a browser to support a 'Compatibility Mode' are expected to decrease over time.

Terms that are in adjacent table cells can be identified with EMERSE, but the highlighter will not properly highlight the terms within the document since the highlighter fails with the intervening HTML tags that make up the table cells.

For example, if looking for the phrase "apple pie" , the term would be identified by EMERSE in the table as shown below (because they are in adjacent table cells), but it would not be highlighted when displayed to the user.

EMERSE shows a text snippet of the terms it finds, within a string of about 50 characters. This provide a concise way for a user to quickly skim the results to see if they are of interest. For very long words, or for terms separate by a large distance (which can result from a proximity search with Advanced Terms), a snippet may not appear at all if the length of the snippet is too long and surpasses the limit of the snippet generator. This will not affect the overall counts that are displayed, but it will prevent the snippet from being shown, which could make it difficult to identify the document(s) with hits.

Overlapping terms that are supposed to be highlighted with different colors may not always be displayed with the correct color. For example, if the word diabetes should be highlighted in yellow and diabetes mellitus should be highlighted in blue, the highlighter can sometimes get" confused" since the word diabetes could be both yellow or blue.