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my front office takes a message and sends it tothe nurse. The patient calls back with questions on how it's going several hours later, but they are no longer able to access the status of that message. Anyway to work around this?

My old program allow the front office to input all information on prescriptions and then all I had to do was "send".anyway to do a similar type program with amazing charts? I considered creating a "refill nurse" with power to prescribe and then letting the front office enter and okay the faxed prescriptions that I signed off on. Any other suggestions?

There's a way to activate your Eprescribing so that refills come through amazing charts, just forgot at the moment how it's done.

Most of my refill requests now come through via Amazing charts although I still get faxes now and then.

The message is always available to the person who sent it by choosing the "Outbox" section of the message window menu drop-down, even if it is sitting in another user's Inbox. If the next person on the message chain completes the message, they should save it to the chart, so everyone can access it. If the patient is calling back after several hours, wondering about action on their previous call, you don't have an AC problem. Start "taking names and kicking [censored]" as the saying goes...


In the "Administrator Options" under the "View" menu, look for "User Account (Configuration)". Choose whatever nurse you want to authorize to do your Rx's and click "Allow user to prescribe for" and choose your name.

I am not sure why you want them to know the status of the message. The nurse probably hasn't even changed the status. While things that take a long time like referrals as you wait for the date and time and insurance, etc., those who do referrals will continue to pull the message from their inbox, document, and send it back. I can see it anytime by logging into their account. We all use the same password. Just one letter.

Now, as an example, your front staff sends a message for the nurse saying that Mrs. Impatient who is soon to be Mrs. Inpatient has called wanting her lab results, or a refill or whatever. That is it for them. They are back to scheduling, checking in and going on Facebook.

The MA/Nurse is now dealing with the message either by him or herself or more likely, sending it back and forth to the doctor to get information.

So, when Mrs. Impatient who knows you close at 5PM but insists on calling at 2PM even though your staff told her your MA or they would call with the necessary information, they should just tell her, "She hasn't had a chance to get to it yet. When she does, she will call you as soon as she is able."

I would agree with Bert that your office work flow or patient education may be the issue, not AC. On prescriptions, when the patient calls asking for a refill our staff tell patients that we will get to it as soon as possible however we require 24 hours for prescriptions, then the patient is told to check with the pharmacy tomorrow NOT us. In reality we get these Rx's all done same day, but we are training patients to have patience. This ain't McDonald's.

If the patient has a truly urgent need for the Rx, we assure them it will get taken care of immediately, but they are reminded 24 hours notice is necessary in the future.

If you send all refills electronically, they will start coming in via SureScripts. The pharmacies should send you the automatic refill notifications via the E-prescriber on any med that was previously sent via E-Rx.

Another issue is when I get a report that a pateint has had an MI, a new surgery etc, I like to document it in the past medical history portion of the chart. Anyway to do this without ctreating an "encounter that needs to be signed and creates another chart entry to have to scan through?( this is general info not diagnostic codes that I would add to problem list)

Currently, this is not able to be done. It is something many have asked for. Hopefully, it will get put into the program.

Bert is correct. There is no way to do this, yet most of us AC users would like this feature added.

You can make an encounter like I have been doing for the past 3-4 years, using "per telephone" or "as a consequence of Labs" as the CC so that scanning through the Past Visits is easier. But then you will not be so 'meaningful' in your 'use' as these will count as encounters, and 'prove' that you do not take the vitals on every 'encounter'. (Do I sound annoyed?)

I'm Lovin' It! Training our patients to be patient! ha

How true. At McDonalds, they have to pay in full BEFORE they get their food.

I use ADDENDUMS to document phone calls or other events/conversations that need to be documented but occurred outside of an actual encounter.

DOES ANYONE KNOW IF THERE HAS BEEN ANY UPDATE ON THIS?

I think you still have to make a new encounter.

Starbug, we also had that question in our office for AC. We know that in the other EMR systems that we have used, every staff member was able to see any message taken on the patient no matter where it was in regards to being completed or not.
Example::: Jill took a message at 8:30 on Inpatient Sally. Inpatient Sally called back at 10:00 and every office member was able to go into her chart and see the outstanding incomplete message or the completed message. We were able to add to the message before it was completed and even after it was completed and saved to the chart.
This kept the staff from hunting employees down asking who took the message. It also kept us from putting in new messages when all we had to do was open up the old one and add to it.
Allison

to starbug's question about documenting procedures/dx: consider adding it ("bypass status", "appendectomy status", "coronary artery disease", etc.) to the PROBLEM LIST if you want it CODED, then EDIT the problem and change the start date (defaults to "today")
Then it is available for review and manual addition later when an encounter is created
OR set pop note
OR add alert
OR create a reminder message

and can copy from those fields and paste into the PMH.

Roger, that is one of the best ideas for a work-around that I have ever seen on the user board. Not being able to add data to the past medical history, etc., has been an ongoing frustration for years.

It is a good workaround. It's almost not a workaround. Now, if we could get the problem list on a dropdown or on the first page somehow. I tend to overlook the problem list as it is on an entirely different page.