Student guide · Page 6 of 8
File findings on the exam map
A clickable body map, five finding types, and the difference between a draft and a signed finding.
Record observations and findings is the last of the session’s three tasks, and this is where the findings half of it happens. Findings go on the Exam Map, a body diagram you tap to pick a region. It has an anterior and a posterior view, and each region carries a count of what has been filed there.
The map stores regions, not pixels. You are not drawing on a picture. Picking “left upper quadrant” files a structured finding that can later be counted, compared across the cohort, and read back by anyone on your service. A freehand scribble on an image cannot be asked “which donors had a finding in the left inguinal region”.
Five finding types
| Type | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Pathology | Disease. The mass, the adhesions, the diseased valve. |
| Anatomical variant | A structure that is present but not where the textbook puts it. |
| External observation | Something read off the surface rather than out of the dissection. A scar, a pressure sore, a stoma. |
| Dissection note | What you did and what state you left the region in. |
| Normal / as expected | Worth filing. “We looked and it was unremarkable” is information. |
An external observation is deliberately not a Pathology, because the scar is not the disease. A right-iliac-fossa scar is evidence of an appendicectomy. File the evidence and keep the inference separate.
Draft, then sign
Every finding posts through one form with two buttons:
- Save draft. The finding stays yours. Nobody else sees it.
- Sign & file. It goes to your service, and everyone assigned to this donor can read it.
A draft is the way out for something you are not sure of yet. It is not a place to leave work permanently; a finding nobody else can see is a finding the other seven students will rediscover the hard way.
Signed findings are not deleted. If you get something wrong, you file an addendum, a correction attached to the original, which stays. This is how a clinical record works. It is a permanent account of what was known and when.
Write carefully the first time, and prefer “we could not determine whether” over a confident claim you will have to append to.
Everything is attributed, and faculty read all of it
Every finding carries its author. Nothing on the map is private to the person who wrote it. Not to your service, and not to faculty, who have to read it to grade it. The UI tells you this where you write. There is no private note here.
That is deliberate. The reason to put this in a record rather than a notebook is that the next person reads it.
Tie it to the imaging
The label you placed and the measurement you took in the viewer do not survive the viewer.
Type them into the finding, with the plane and the image number: mass 4.7 × 3.1 cm on the coronal reformat, image 41. A number in a signed finding is permanent. A line drawn on a screen is not.