Question: How can the clinical service for an inpatient be corrected by a ward clerk?
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. It affects the integrity of lists and reports. Patients are assigned to an appropriate clinical service (e.g., general surgery) as part of admitting and bed allocation workflows.
The clinical service can change during an admission if a patient is transferred to a new service (e.g., cardiology, critical care) or when patients are moved within a facility to manage things like outbreaks. Bed management and service census reports depend upon accurate service attachments.
Intra-facility transfer workflows are largely facilitated by non-prescribers, who can double-check and correct inpatient service assignments. The current service attachment is easy to see. Look to the StoryBoard (leftmost column) and the "ADMITTED" section. Hover to reveal admission details, with the "Service" identified:
Answer: Service assignments can be updated during intra-facility transitions. The following steps are available to ward clerks (inpatient unit clerk role), with similar workflows available to nursing and inpatient unit managers.
- With Hyperspace opened to an appropriate role and department (e.g., specific ward), select the "Unit Manager" workspace, which lists patients in the location for the login department.
- Select a patient by clicking within the appropriate row of the unit list.
- Select the "Update" button from among the command buttons at the top of the Unit Manager workspace.If the Update button is not present, be sure to check the personalization tool (wrench icon at far right of button row at the top of the Unit Manager workspace) for rarely used buttons that can be dragged back to the Unit Manager button bar.
- The selected patient chart will open with an "Update Admission" activity displayed by default. Look to the "Service" field, where a new inpatient service can be selected (be sure to document the reason in the field provided by selecting "Patient Status/Service Changed"). The "Finish" (bottom-right) button must be used to save the change.
