Admitting a patient to Hospital
Guys,
Could someone please enlighten me as to how we would admit a patient to hospital please?
It is a feature we have not used to date. Here is what I figure from reading the forum and CSH:
1. Patient is on schedule view as an appointment
2. Patient is marked as waiting - so ends up on the work list, say "waiting list", but still remains on the first schedule
3. Patient can be transferred from the "waiting list", to a second worklist called "hospital".
So - is there a simple way to change the status of the patient on the schedule to "admitted", and they therefore appear in the hospital worklist as admitted to?
Re: Admitting a patient to Hospital
Cahir - the sequence should be as follows:
1. Patient has appointment on schedule - status will be Pending
2. Patient arrives - select appointment and press Check-In button. You will be asked to select the Worklist. We run 3: Hospital, Surgery, Waiting Room. Assume that they have come in for Surgery - so select Surgery.
3. Next you are asked for patient weight - enter and press Ok
4. You now get shown the Visit editor with the visit created and the weight filled in.
5. Normally you would press Ok, but you could start entering medical records stuff. After you press OK, you will be back at the Workflow|Scheduling screen with the appointment status set to Checked-In. If you call up Workflow|Worklists you will see an task for the patient with status Pending.
6. When the Surgeon arrives, he selects the task and pressed the Consult button. This brings up the visit editor. He enters stuff and presses OK. This takes him back to the Worklists screen with the task status now In Progress (and if you look on the scheduling screen this will also show the appointment as In Progress).
7. Assume that Fido will not be going home but will stay overnight in Hospital. The Surgeon moves (using drag and drop or copy/paste) the task from the Surgey worklist to the Hospital worklist.
8. Nursing staff etc use the Consult button to call up the visit editor and enter stuff. Having entered the last charge on the invoice, they press Complete. This will leave them back in the Worklist screen with the task status Billed.
9. If you look at the Scheduling screen, this will also show the appointment as status Billed.
10. The final step is to press the Checkout button. This can be done either on the Worklist screen or the Scheduling screen. This do the invoicing stuff and will set the appointment and task status to Completed.
For more info see http://www.openvpms.org/documentation/csh/1.8/concepts/schedulesWorklists
Note: in step 5 our staff have a horrible habit of simply killing the Visit Editor (using the red X at the top right of its window) rather than pressing its OK button. Doing this leaves the appointment still with Pending status.
With regard to your question about Admitted status - as it says in the above link:
Ie 'admitted' is not a status set automatically as part of the workflow - if you want to use it then you need to set it manually. We do not use it and treat Checked-In as functionally equal to Admitted.
Regards, Tim G
Re: Admitting a patient to Hospital
Hi Tim,
We have used the system much as you suggest, and mostly it has worked a treat. But since our upgrade, there has been a glitch that I have not been able to fix - when a patient is checked in, it may appear on the 'consults' worklist, but its status hasn't changed on the schedule, so although the receptionist may have checked it in, it appears to me that it hasn't been, and I do it again, only to find it now twice on the worklist (when this happens, the 'consult' button is not offered from the scheduling page, so unless you go to the worklists you assume it is not checked in). This also ends up in the patient then having 2 entries for its weight on that date for instance (easy enough to delete one of them, but shouldn't be happening).
Also, when a patient is checked out, the system is no longer removing them from the worklist automatically (I'm pretty sure this used to happen) so we have to go to the worklist and 'delete' anything from the worklists that should no longer be there. But perhaps we are not using the status of the patient correctly? - I will have to pay more attention to this and give you more feedback. But it does seem to be behaving differently from before. This part is frustrating because the worklist can only handle so many entries and then it won't allow you to check anything in, saying 'too many uncompleted tasks' so you then have to go back to worklist and delete unwanteds before you can check in the current patient.
None of it is terribly unmanageable, but I think it is either the way we are using it, or that there is in fact a glitch, fixing either of which would result in saving a bit of hassle with each admission/consult.
Also to input on Cahir's comments - we have 'Consults', 'Surgery/In-hospital' and 'Follow-up/In Progress' collumns in our worklists, so mostly appointments are checked-in to consults, and then checked-out once dealt with, and only if they are admitted, are they then transferred to the 'in-hospital' list. This seems to work well and make sense to me.
l think the system works really well once you figure out its logic, if I can figure out the abovementioned glitches, it will save even more hassle.
Regards,
Daryl Hunt