Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Importing an Excel Flowsheet

I have seen some postings about creating a flowsheet that can be imported into appropriate charts (eg- PT-INR flowsheets for patients on Coumadin) but can't seem to get this process to work. The imported flowsheet (which has columns for date, INR, coumadin dosage, new dosage, next INR date, etc) seems to be imported as a PDF file and the columns can't be filled in. Any solutions?

Saw this before - first thing is to check and see what happens when you just click on the Excel file - does it open in Excel? (this has to do with default application settings at an OS level).

There are other things that we can check - but I ran into that with a practice that was tight on money so we installed open-source office - works great with the files, and from an OS perspective everything was good.

Down-side, AC is hard-coded and bypasses calling the OS, so that produces problems in that instance.

Can anyone respond who has successfully imported flowsheets that can be filled in with data over time. Believe Bert had a "blog" about this but when doing a search it no longer seems to exist.

DrAC,
We do use Excel spreadsheets regularly and they work well.
Try these steps (which are pretty much the same as for any imported item) and let us know if you have any problems:
Open the patients chart to imported items
Click "import new...files" (or hit ctrl-f)
Browse for items
Navigate to the name of the Excel sheet you want to use (can be a blank sheet, or a template you created).
Click open. Select a category and name.
Click import item.

You should see an Excel icon in the list of II on the left.

Here is where the fun begins. If things go properly, when you click on the icon, the spreadsheet will open in the pane at the right. If it does not, then you need to begin to tinker.

If you have a problem, the issue is often dependent upon the operating system of your machine, your default browser (believe it or not), and the default program used to spreadsheet files.

Give it a shot and let us know how it goes.