Managing Patient Information
Whenever you place an order, you must include certain patient demographic information, including the patient’s identification number, first name, last name, date of birth, and sex. Depending on who is responsible for paying for the lab tests, other information (such as the patient’s address and telephone number) might also be required.
You can specify this information when you place an order, but to streamline the order entry process, you might want to register the patient before you place any orders. You can do this using either the Setup menu item or the Order Entry page.
If you have a bridge—that is, a connection between the computer running this application and an external system, such as PMS or POS—you can import demographic and billing information about patients from that system.
After patient information has been added to the system, you can edit or delete it at any time. Editing patient information does not affect any batched, filed, held, or scheduled orders; you must update those manually. (Standing orders are updated automatically.) Likewise, deleting a patient does not delete any batched, filed, held, scheduled, or standing orders, but you will not be able to access the held or standing orders for a deleted patient.
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Notes:
• You can add, edit, or delete patient information only if you can place orders with your current lab.
• When you change an existing patient’s last name, first name, date of birth, or sex, the client receives notification of the change through comments on the patient test results (if the lines available for comments are not used to provide other information). The comment is included on the first report that is sent for that patient after the change has occurred. Subsequent reports do not contain the comment.
• If you change the station or room for a patient of a long-term care (LTC) client, that information is automatically updated in all of the patient’s pending orders, including expired standing orders.
• When you register a patient, you are also prompted for billing information. If you have not already done so, you might want to create groups of favorite carriers before you register patients.
• After a certain amount of time, if the demographic information for a particular patient has not been updated, and no orders have been placed for that patient, the patient’s record might be removed from the eLabs database. (The date when the record was last updated appears in the Patient Information area on the Order Entry page after the patient has been retrieved.) The amount of time that patient records are retained varies by lab. Some labs might keep their patient records indefinitely; others might remove their inactive records after 2–15 years.
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