Gerardo et al,
This is a major weakness of Amazing Charts that has been recognized for years. It is important and so it is a recurring topic here; lately it comes up every couple of months, in part because of MU. It has never really been addressed. My understanding is that it is now on the radar screen of the development group at the company and perhaps sometime this year will get significant attention. We will continue to bring it up at clinical advisory board meetings.
I wrote a long post about this a few years ago. If you are a masochist, go
here for the full text.
To address a couple of your particular questions (some of what follows is quoted from that post):
My staff usually print orders which are given to patients for labs, xrays, surgeries. Once printed, these "orders" usually just sit in the "order" section without ever being touched again. I recently deleted almost 10 years worth or "orders" which were just clogging the system.
When you write an order, you are given three choices:
Print, save (without sending), or save and send.
1. ?Print? gives you a printed copy, but as far as I can tell, does not record the order anywhere.
2. ?Save (without sending)? puts the order in the current note (in the plan section) and in the list of orders that you can see by going to "View...orders?. From there it can be reconciled.
3. ?Save and send? puts it in the current note, and in the list of orders to be reconciled, and also puts it in a message sent to a user.
So if you want AC to simply act like a printer and print the order (which saves time because the patient?s demos, insurance, and diagnosis are on it) then create an order and use ?print?. To record that order in any way in the chart, you must then re-type it into the note.
To address your issue, have your staff hit "print". The order will not "clog the system" because it will not be saved.
As far as I can tell there is no way to look at "pending" or "completed" orders written for a particular patient within the patient's chart.
Go to "Past Encounters" in the patient's chart (by right-clicking on the name, or hitting F8, etc). Click on "orders". All of the orders will display. (Looks good at first, but this does not help with "reconciliation"...you cannot manipulate the orders in any way, so I am not sure if this helps you).
why not set up a way to "reconcile" an order in the import window
This has been suggested multiple times by multiple people and has been presented as a suggestion to AC developers. It should be at least part of the answer to making order reconciliation practical.
I am sure there are lots of users out there with slow running ac's due to thousands of "un-reconciled" orders.
It is unclear exactly how much effect these orders have on system speed. We have avoided the problem by printing orders without saving (as I mentioned above). Even so, I think it is worth periodically going to the main screen...View...Orders, and then clear out the list by clicking on the top of the list, holding shift and clicking the bottom of the list, then hitting the "Completed" radio button.
