Hi All,

We've now started using OpenVPMS in the practice, and things are going fairly well... although it's quite a learning curve for our staff. Some of them only work 3 hours a week, and that's no way to learn a new system easily.

One issue that we've encountered is regarding workflow and rabies certificates. Since we're in the US, we weren't sure if the requirements are the same in Australia for this or not. We need to issue a rabies tag to each animal, with a unique ID (for the clinic) on it. Here's what we've been doing:

1. Clinician enters "Consult" phase of workflow.
2. Clinician adds "Rabies 1 Year" product to invoice, which has "Vaccination Certificate.odt" template attached to it.
3. Clinician completes workflow w/ "In Progress" status.
4. Clinician fumbles around looking for a (collar) rabies tag.
5. Clinician re-enters workflow and finds the automatically added Form.
6. Clinician edits the form description to add the rabies tag number and lot number of vaccine into the description field of the form (in medical records).
7. Clinician exits workflow with "Complete" (billed) status.
8. Clinician hands rabies-tag to technician.
9. Technician enters "Check-out" in workflow.
10. Technician prints out "Vaccination Certificate" during checkout.
11. Technician tapes rabies tag to certificate, signs, and hands to customer.

Note that steps 1 through 8 could in theory also be done by the technician, but we've now moved to having Clinicians do invoicing (we didn't do that before) so that they can ensure their names are on the invoices properly. We also experimented with technicians doing steps 5 through 8, but having them work in the consultation portion of the workflow is problematic. It's not natural to "consult" during a "check-out".

Eitherway, the way I think this should work is the following:

1. Clinician enters "Consult" phase of workflow.
2. Clinician adds "Rabies 1 Year" product to invoice, which has "Vaccination Certificate.odt" template attached to it.
3. Clinician selects "Documents" from bottom area of invoice (next to Investigations and Reminders). (>>> This doesn't exist currently. <<<)
4. Cilnician fumbles around looking for a rabies-tag.
5. Clinician enters data into the description field which shows up w/ the document information.
6. Clinician exits workflow with "Complete" status.
7. Clinician hands rabies-tag to technician.
8. Steps 9-11 above.

In this case, there's no need to re-enter workflow in order to add description information. Note that I've changed the Vaccination Certificate to print the description field, thus showing the rabies tag number on the certificate. This would also allow technicians to edit the rabies tag during Checkout (without entering the medical records).

Am I thinking about this all wrong? What process are others using for this?

Thanks,

Paul