Question: How can the clinical service for an inpatient be corrected by a prescriber?
Context: Inpatients are associated with a location (e.g., emergency department, ward, facility), a clinical service (e.g., family medicine, general internal medicine) and one or more inpatient or consultant provider teams.
The clinical service assignment is important. This patient characteristic affects lists and reports. Patient admission orders demand selection of an appropriate clinical service (e.g., general surgery) and the value is checked by bed planners.
The clinical service can change during an admission if a patient is transferred to a new service (e.g., critical care), and the transfer order usually takes care of this. Sometimes providers do not attend to the service change during intra-facility transfers, with the consequence that the patient can be attributed to the wrong service and turns up in the wrong place in census reports.
The clinical service affiliation is easy to check. Look to the StoryBoard (leftmost column) and the "ADMITTED" section. Hover to reveal admission details, with the "Service" identified:
Answer: It is easy to correct a service assignment missed during an intra-facility transfer.
- With the patient chart open to the current inpatient encounter, go to the "Orders" activity.
- Enter "Patient Status" as a search term and select the "Update Patient Status" order.
- Use the first property in the order composer to select the new inpatient clinical service, then accept and sign the order. No other values need to be changed.
