Your Vote Counts

Sometimes there are many descriptions for a single term or medical abbreviation. This is more prone to happen when there are only two characters (e.g., PO, AB). MedAbbrev has added a new feature to allow our users to "Vote" on a particular term/description combination. This is done by clicking on the plus image if this is an entry commonly used in your organization or the minus image if it is a term you rarely use. More commonly used entries (those with the most votes) will show up before the less common entries (which remain in alphabetical order).

Please keep in mind that when you vote, your vote counts along with everyone else that votes. Overall higher results will be displayed at the top of the list. Lower votes will appear further down the list.

Here’s an example of how the vote option works. If you do a search on "BAC", and the entries related to blood alcohol are more likely to be used in your organization than "benzalkonium chloride", then you could click on the plus to vote for the entries for "blood alcohol content" and "blood-alcohol concentration". It will look something like this:

image 1

The change in how the search results are displayed doesn’t happen immediately. In order to see the new results, click the search button again. At that point (unless there are more votes for other entries), you’ll see the blood alcohol results showing at the top of the list.

image 2

Yes, like government elections, you only get a single vote per term/description combination, so once you have voted, the icon will change to a solid color to indicate that you have voted. Also, like other elections, even if you vote with a plus, if there are more people voting for another term, the other term will appear above the one that you voted for. We don’t always get the candidate that we want, but our vote always counts.

Note: If you accidentally click the wrong icon for your vote (you clicked the negative vote but you meant to click the positive button), just click the one it is supposed to be and it will uncheck the other one.

If you forget what the "Vote" column means, there’s a little blue circle with an "i" which stands for "information." Just click on that for a little reminder of what that column is for.