Work lists are basically lists of tasks that are queued up for completion within the practice. To get to the this section, click "Workflow" then "Work Lists". You'll see the following when you get there.

This header section of the worklists area shows that worklist tasks can be filtered and highlighted in numerous ways, similar to the schedule view. Here's a brief list of how you can configure your view.

  • View: The system will have been configured with 1 or more views into the worklists. Some have multiple worklists showing at once, and some show only one, or a subset of all worklists.
  • Date: This works identically to how the schedule date controller works.
  • Work List: Which worklist to view. This can filter the current view.
  • Clinician: Show only tasks for a particular clinician.
  • Highlight: Change the view highlighting to be based on Status, Event Type, or Clinician.
  • Status: Show all tasks, just incomplete tasks, or just complete tasks.

Tasks in the worklists can be used for almost any type of task in OpenVPMS. There is however, one type of task that is automatically part of the system, and part of the overall workflow -- the Consultation.

Consultations

A consultation is the primary activity as related to an appointment. That is, a consultation gets linked to an appointment. When checking-in a patient from the schedule, this task gets automatically created.

The benefit here is that doctor's, theoretically, have no need to look at the schedule. They can merrily go from consultation to consultation, or surgery to surgery without worrying about scheduling and reception. Of course, many doctor's do care to look at the appointment schedule as well. And so, the "Consult" workflow action has been placed in both of these places.

enlightenedTip: Any changes to a patient appointment or task, affected through the workflow or otherwise, will result in changes to the task and the appointment.

It's important to realize that the task is completely separate (although linked) from the appointment. As such, it's important to manage both.

Roll Call

One of the most important uses of tasks is that they hold the information of when a patient was in the practice. This is valuable information, and should be preserved as well as possible. Many pratices, therefore, have setup separate task lists just to track hospitalization. This work list can therefore become a list of all hospitalized patients -- very useful at a glance.

Other uses can include medical observation (or boarding), general appointment scheduling, phone callback scheduling, etc. We won't dictate here what the optimal configuration for your practice is.

You can also transfer patients from worklist to worklist. Say for instance you had a worklist called "Consultation List" and had another worklist called "Hospitalized List". It's often the case that during a consultation, it's decided to hospitalize a patient. In this situation, you would "Transfer" the patient from the Consultation List to the Hosptilazed List.

enlightenedTip: When you do the "Check-in" workflow action, you can select what task list to create a task on.

Tasks in the Workflow

The tasks that make up the worklist are an integral part of the workflow. When you click on a task, you'll notice that the associated (3 C's) buttons appear at the bottom of the screen. You can interact with the task or the appointment to achieve the same result.

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