We need to have a simple way to recall patients on some fuzzy date it the future, like 6 months from “now”. The “Patient Reminders” tools now only work for automated, rules not ad-hoc call recalls.
In the meantime I came up with a not-too-complicated way to do this with custom fields in the DEM layout, and a list entry. Then using the patient search to process the recalls. Screen shots attached to the tracker entry show it and could also be used for “specs”, kind of.
Not really, as it the front desk that does recalls and they don’t need (nor typically have) access to encounters. The Dr. says to the patient: “tell the front desk I want you back in 6 weeks”, or just to the front desk sometimes, “Call Ms Jones next week and reminder her to come in for that eye test …”
-Tony
It should be a standalone function available from the patient summary screen as a widget, that could be tied from an encounter as well. AND it should show up in the Reminders report tools as well as work from the BatchCOM… that’s the feature needed. All I did was provide and example of a practical work around using existing features.
But 6 weeks from “when?” Doing it relative to an encounter captures the from when part in most cases. You are right that it might not be tied to an encounter. e.g. Have Ms. Jones follow up with us next week to discuss the test results we just got back.
The front desk might be entering the information but the data was initially generated by the physician as when to follow-up is a clinical decision.
6 weeks from “now”, ie date of entry. That does not need to be tied to a Date of Service, necessarily. There is definitely a place for both variants as well as the automated/clinical reminders.
-Tony
How about a simple new “follow ups” table with Patient ID, date of entry, follow up period and comment.
This would more easily provide a mechanism to have more than one follow up planned per patient at a time.
There are more potential fields, but that would probably be enough to get things started.
That’s possible, it might be interesting to make it so it’s easy to add new LBF forms (with out coding) that can be menu items or added as widgets (or both). Then you don’t have to write a U/I. But you still need reporting and is still should be part of the overall reminders systems. I hate to have to explain to customers that some Reminders are over there and some are over here… :-) Like I already do with FeeSheet/Superbill and Services that aren’t services and all that.
Extending the existing Patient Reminders widget to poll this new table shouldn’t be that hard. Where to put the “report” for pending followups is a different question. I wouldn’t want to have to generate this report through the existing batchcom stuff as that’s “engine” is too slow. The needed query is something simple, comparing the current date to the entries in the new followups table.
The appointment_report.php is a simple basis for this …. maybe we could combine the appointments report which is, frequently, used to do reminder calls for actual appts, so maybe there could be a ‘check box’ to show upcoming ‘Recalls’ too. Same info as Appt, just fuzzier on the date.
-Tony
Craig,
Not really, because you can’t/shouldn’t make an appointment without contacting the patient. It makes sense to track this separately. Also there is the “fuzzy date” thing.
I like the idea of a generic reminder system that has onscreen and or popup for the targeted users. I would add ‘All’ as a selection. Not sure if there should be ACL around the ‘remove’ action. Maybe it should be more like the messages, where it can be tagged as ‘Read’ or ‘Done’ and log by whom.
-Tony
The way I was thinking of it was to have a field “Processed” and set it to 1 when the user removes it with a field “completdBy” which records the user that marked it as completed, this is for auditing only.
Perhaps have a “message status” page which displays messages sent out by the current user, and shows their status.
Fuzzy dates? Yeah, we need reminders, we need them yesterday, and the dates need to be very very fuzzy. We need “first Friday of each month”. We need “First Thursday 6 months from now”…Just when I thought the calender was getting to a really useful point, it gets immediately pointed out to me that EVERYTHING in the insurance verification world operates off of fuzzy dates. This is more immediately needed for calender appointments (because the calender is used for a lot more than booking patient appointments), but the capability is needed at large.
features :
- non-invasive (auto-hides messages if none are due or overdue)
- flags due and overdue messages in red
- only displays next 5 messages at a time
- only shows next 5 days messages
- doesn’t delete messages, flags them as processed (better for auditing) - will add a history screen
- send to any user (including self)
- has a priority setting
- link to patient (not functional yet)
- sorts by date then priority
to do :
- link to patient (need to link to patient select screen)
- add a history (or message status) screen
- tighten security
- bring up to OpenEMR standard code
