Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Quest Lab ordering from AC

We enabled this feature for our practice for about since Sep 1 2017. We find it very useful and fairly easy to place orders. The only grief we are having is because Quest will not accept insurance ID with spaces and dashes. All our insurance IDs are coded with dashes or spaces to improve readability. Now for every order in Quest we have to manually remove these dashes or spaces.

Anyone else also experiencing this and finds it a sore point.

Clearly if AC removes these spaces or dashes from insurance ID field before making it available to Quest, life could be better...


Thoughts ?

Thanks
aramiz
Houston, TX

There was no response from anyone on this Quest Lab ordering inquiry.

Are you not using Quest ordering in AC ?

Or the member IDs do not have dashes or spaces for your practice ?


Thanks
Aramiz
Houston TX

Our practice had a similar issue a number of moths ago. Some patients wouldn't 'pull up' in Quest. After weeks and weeks of troubleshooting with Amazing Charts and Quest, it was determined that a hyphen in the Insurance Company name was the culprit. Once this was determined, a few weeks later Quest rolled out a patch that fixed this issue. Perhaps they can do the same for account numbers?

Dean
Emmanuel Family Practice
Pittsburgh, PA

Thank you Dean.

I shall push Quest to roll out this solution for all.


Thanks
Aramiz

Might a current user elaborate further on the work flow with the bidirectional Quest lab orders?
I'm trying to understand if this might be practical for my practice, or add more time than it is worth.
My current workflow for ordering labs is:
...MostRecentEncounter/WriteOrders
...Labs
...Click on one or more from custom library of tests I created or edited from defaults that come with AC (e.g. CBC with diff)
...PrintOrders
...PrintIcon
...DropDownBoxArrow
...Click on Hardcopy Printer
...OK
...Save
9 clicks total. Tell patient to pick up hardcopy lab slip from receptionist on way out. Quest knows nothing about order until patient shows up at lab with hardcopy of requisition. Patients lose hardcopy requisitions sometimes.

There was another post here: "Amazing Charts ? Forums ? Discussions ? General Discussion ? Can AC send Lab orders electronically to Quest Labs?" that suggested users activating the bidirectional interface then have to take one or more actions in their browser window on Quest's Care360 website to complete the lab order.

Can anyone elaborate, particularly on the number of additional clicks or data fields that must be completed?
Does the browser open automatically and log you onto Quest automatically and open the patient record automatically and open the requisition automatically, or are these all user tasks that must be added to the work flow?
Does it save the order to the EncounterNote automatically?
Does it print or e-mail anything to the patient to remind them labs have been ordered and to go to the lab?
If so, does it do so immediately for labs intended to be done now, and at a future date for labs intended to be drawn 1 week before a 3 month return visit?
If you haven't pre-loaded a rarely used test into your AC order set, does the interface allow you to search in AC for the one you want (for example "pertussis" returns 7 choices of tests on Quest's website)?

Thanks.

Hello all,

I've stated this before on the boards with regards to Quest. If you are not interested in tracking labs from Quest, this will be the best solution for you. Since 2011, I have printed lab requisitions from Quest and sent them with the bloodwork we draw here (or send the patient to the lab with it). I have had NO ISSUES doing labs this way with Quest. The Amazing Charts requisitions that are printed are scanned in via OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and I get my labs back electronically without issue.

Now this solution will not work if you want to reconcile labs. I don't see the point of doing Quests work for them.

Marty

Hi

I will try to comment on both Mike and Marty's questions/thoughts here.

Placing orders from Amazing Chart to Quest has some benefits:
a. Placing Lab order from EMR will likely be a MIPS/MACRA measure in 2018.
b. Once Quest ordering interface is enabled in AC
1. Amazing chart patient data and lab order will directly be exported onto Quest portal
2. you may have to map the AC order into Questo only once for a specific order. Next time even for a different patient the mapping will not be required. Quest interface requires that the insurance ID field has no spaces or dashes and home phone number field is populated. Again those data will be coming in from AC.
3. And then place the order and print it.
So perhaps a few more clicks than before. But clinical benefits are:
c. If a member says the paper copy of the requisitions is lost, Quest itself has the order electronically. Reduces front desk overhead of reprinting the requisition and delivering. All member has to do is go to the neighborhood Quest lab and the order will be there. Is not this great !
d. Lastly because the order is really clean. No phone call back and forth with front desk and Quest on interpreting the ordering elements.

AC sends no email to patient on Quest order. But member can open an account with Quest and Quest may have the capability to view result and perhaps generate a patient email whenever a new order comes in.


You ultimately have judge for yourself if it is worth the few more key strokes for the benefit noted above.

Thanks
Aramiz

Quest contacted us a week or two ago and asked if we can remove the offending characters which we cannot..they are perfectly valid from our perspective and it's Quest that considers them invalid for their processing rules. Even if we could every user would need to update to the next release. They can fix this from their end as it enters the pipe for all users at once so they'll be cleaning that up.