Many glossaries

I type for a hospital with over 200 potential dictating physicians, many with the potential of dictating several different kinds of reports (H&P, Consult, OP, Holter, etc)... and I have folders for each kind of report that they might dictate...inside each folder is a glossary for each doctor that might dictate that kind of report... loads and loads of glossaries.. :) Many doctors have multiple glossaries spread across the folders, but each one has the type of dictation built into the name so I can keep them straight at a glance...

I also have a "main" glossary that is my workhorse with all of the generic glossary entries....the ones that everyone uses at one time or another (as well as entries to correct my typical mispellings on the fly)....I also have a glossary for drugs, two for headers (one with underlines and one without), one for doctors names, one for dates and one for sutures. Each of the individual doctor's glossaries in the folders all have various combinations of these as "includes". For example, all of them include the workhorse glossary and the drugs glossary, but only surgeons and er docs have sutures as an include....

lastly, I have one glossary to manage all of the others. All of them include this one too.

when I have instant text running I have 5 glossaries open....
line 1 is the management glossary.
line 2 is drugs
line 3 is the workhorse generic terms
line 4 is the active glossary for whomever is in my ear at the moment...

when I get a new dictation I type the short from the "management glossary" to switch to the new doctor from the appropriate folder..the glossary entry to switch glossaries are all the same...

first command to close the current glossary (freeing up line 4 for the next doctor glossary to open), then a command to open the desired glossary.

For example, to load up Dr. Smith from the ER I type lsmither

{command}{CloseCurrentGlossary}{LoadGlossary}c:\insttxt\glossary\Smith_ER.glo{LoadGlossary}_

I keep the first 3 glossaries open because they are the ones I most often add entries to when I want to affect many glossaries globally....the 4th one is always the one I'm typing from and gets any individual changes such as when that doctor starts using a new phrase or changes how he usually says something. The 4 lines also correspond to how many lines of instant text I am comfortable having visible at the bottom of the screen. If you show less lines, make the working glossary line 1 instead of 4 and use the control and a number to jump to the ones below the screen when you need to make adjustments in those glossaries.

It's also very easy when I have a brand new doctor I've never typed before. I just start a new blank glossary for that doctor in the appropriate folder and do the normal includes...then as I start learning that doctor his glossary already has all of the generic stuff and I just add his individual phrases to the new one as I learn his vernacular....

this also helps keep the overall size of all of my glossaries small...the workhorse is a bigger glossary with many entries, but all of the individual doctor glossaries are very short, with only the things they happen to say different than anyone else...