Connect Care FAQ: Identity

Showing posts with label Identity. Show all posts

How can an inpatient's provider service be changed by ward clerks?

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.

How can short-term (on-call) coverage assignments be reflected in Connect Care?

Question: Are there tools in Connect Care that prescribers can use to quickly reflect changes in on-call, attending or other patient-prescriber attachments?

Context: Prescriber-patient attachments (e.g., attending, consulting) can change when prescribers come on or off rotation, or take on-call responsibilities. Connect Care provides in-system tools for managing these changes. These are especially useful for short-term patient coverage changes, such as on-call or weekend assignments. The tools do not replace other systems (e.g., ROCA) used to manage call schedules.

There is no one way to express coverage responsibilities. It is essential that local groups forge a clear understanding about how prescribers will manage and reflect sign-overs within Connect Care.

Answer: A new Manual section and Tip describe and illustrate tools that facilitate quick changes to prescriber-patient attachments, either one-at-a-time or many-at-a-time. Examples of how these tools can be used include:

Switch Attending Prescriber responsibility for an inpatient

Need: Prescribers may shift a few patients after night-call in order to better balance patient loads or for a better fit of patient need to prescriber expertise.
Action: Use Care Teams via Storyboard or Chart Search to take-over or reassign the attending prescriber.

Switch Attending Prescriber responsibility for a group of inpatients

Need: Prescribers often have assigned "rotations" with responsibility for an inpatient service or location for a defined period, after which all patients are signed over to the next attending.
Action: Use Patient Lists (System Lists for patients grouped by a physical location or department, Provider Team Lists for patients assigned to a specific service, Personal Lists for patients manually grouped by a prescriber) to select multiple patients and reassign attending responsibility for all grouped patients at once.

Designate a prescriber with inpatient on-call responsibilities for a defined period

Need: A prescriber may take responsibility for a group of patients for an on-call or weekend period, without changing who is designated as the attending prescriber.
Action: Using either Care Teams (one patient at a time) or Patient Lists (many patients at a time), add the covering prescriber as an "On Call Covering Physician", specifying a start and a stop time and any specifics about contacting that prescriber.

Hand over responsibility for outpatient communications for a defined period

Need: A prescriber may be away for a period, with arrangements for another prescriber to handle any outpatient-related communications during that period.
Action: Temporarily assign the "out of office" prescriber's In Basket to the covering user(s) and/or message pool(s).

Tools and techniques for taking any of the above actions are illustrated in the Manual and Tip.

Who is my "UNK-" patient?

Question: What is signalled when a patient's last name starts with "UNK-" characters, and what should a prescriber do?

Context: Sometimes patients are admitted before their identity can be reliably confirmed, as might happen with altered states of consciousness. They are assigned a temporary name and record number so that care can proceed. The default last name will start with the letters "UNK-".

Answer: As soon as the patient can be identified, a nursing or clerk team member informs patient registration so that corrections can be made. Health Information Management (HIM) is involved to take care of a potentially complex merge of temporary with permanent health record.

Prescribers can use the "Chart Correction" link (top right of Hyperspace when a chart is open). This provides access to a chart correction guide and a message for requesting a chart correction.

How can I find my Provider ID?

Question: Connect Care prescribers are sometimes asked for their "Provider ID" (identifier) but do not know how to find it.

Context: The Connect Care Provider ID is a unique identifier assigned to a healthcare provider. There is only one such number in Connect Care for a particular practitioner.

Other provider identifier types may refer to things like roles with more than one number possible per provider.

Answer: The fastest way to find a Provider ID for the currently logged in user is to use Chart Search (search box at top right of Hyperspace) to find the "Session Information Report".

Use "Session" as a keyword in Chart Search and then "Jump to" the "Session Information Report".

Within the Session Information Report, look for a section entitled "Login Information" in the left column. The Provider ID is in the row labelled "Linked Provider:", with the actual ID in square brackets after the provider's name.

How can an inpatient's provider service be changed by prescribers?

Question: How can the clinical service for an inpatient be corrected by a prescriber?

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.

How can I correct my Provider Contact Information?

Question: Some providers express concern about how their name, and possibly some address information, appears in After Visit Summaries and other Connect Care communications. How can this be changed?

Context: Basic identification and contact information for Connect Care prescribers comes from the clinical information system provider registry. Seeded from Medical Affairs and Licensing Organization databases, this information may be out of date. Indeed, some physicians may have provided a home address for professional communications and wish to change to something safer for digital records.

Answer: It is easy to check how Connect Care describes a provider, as this information appears in the "Phone Book", available to all authorized users.

The easiest way to find and open the Phone Book is to enter "phone" in the Hyperspace Search (top right) box. Observe menu options that pop up and select the "Phone Book" activity.

Use the "People" tab in the Phone Book and search for your name.
Make sure that you have no duplicate entries (if so, report as instructed below).
Select the row corresponding to your name in the Phone Book search results.
Confirm accuracy and appropriateness of the address, phone number and other information listed.

If changes are required, go to In Basket, and select the "Provider Demographic Update" option from the drop-list that appears when selecting the "New Message" command button. Follow instructions embedded in the message. You can find your "Provider ID" by using Search to open the "Session Information" activity, look in the "Login Information" section, and find the number in square brackets for the "Linked Provider".

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