The resulting PDF output has some minor alignment issues on my systems and some serious missing data.
1) The Phone #'s on the top 2 sections are truncated off the page on the right side.
2) The gray bar that displays in the browser does not print on the form.
3) The signature lines should have the names underneath by standard, but that’s not a big deal.
The biggest issue is the the Facility Name header just defaults to the lowest ID# in the facility table, not the facility that the referring provider is defaulted to nor the clinic that is designated as the 'Billing Facility". It should also include the complete facility information addrs/phone/fax etc. (perhaps even logo).
Finally, The users (and I) are confused about what parts of the form go to who? The top two sections are nearly identical. Is this supposed to be a tear-off form? Would it be better with a page break between part one and parts two and three?
Does any else use this form? What is their experience?
We tried a variety of things to make this form workable without much happiness. One thing we have been doing is to use a "header" GIF file which includes all our facility name, contact, fax etc. It would be no big deal to make that use the logged user ID as part of that, like the CAMOS encounter form signature ID JPG, to allow for multiple headers.
Like you we are confused regarding intent for the referral form. We even commented out one of the pages. But it still is less usable than what we eventually went to which is a cut-paste in Word, then save the Word file as a document. Trying to get the name and address of the recipient was areal nightmare, especially.
I submitted a request I have not seen replied to yet of Mark Leeds who, I believe, authored the CAMOS and the new print links they create in the encounter view. Of them, the Print Encounter seems to be the most powerful, is readily made to look correct with "digitally signed" as well as a signature graphic, all properly formatted and user variable.
Unfortunately, it ONLY grabs the CAMOS data, whereas it would essentially be a perfect and automatic referral form if it grabbed ALL info (SOAP, Vitals, issues, ICD etc) from an encounter, and then had a user edit capability before submitting to PDF form. Mark; if you are reading this…
Contact me directly via my website below and I’ll be happy to send you what I have done with both.
The printed referral form will need some work before it’s generally useful. Right now it handles specific needs of one of my clients.
Also it’s not a PDF, instead using HTML with measurements in “points” and some other tricks to get the printing right. This approach is somewhat experimental and may expose some issues with your browser or printer software.
PDFs of course come with their own baggage, so it seems useful to explore alternatives.
One thing I would highly recommend for a future major release (like 4.x) would be choosing and implementing a common/standardized printing model. It’s different on every form and report. Really confuses the customers.
