Changes for the week of 4/13

Several Changes went into Production this week. Here is a brief synopsis of what went in and why.

Defaulting a Blank for Order Mode: When you enter orders for imaging, lab or contrast you will notice that the order mode field is now blank. This is by design. A pattern emerged that had users confused about what to do with the pop up, and the default of "Standard" was often selected in error. This lead to many orders, for OR cases as an example, that never made their way back for co signatures. You will now need to pick from the list of order modes depending on whether or not you need to send a co sign message to the ordering MD.

No more "Change Order" Icon in Ancillary Orders: Due to the complex nature of parent/child orders in EPIC, a pattern developed where users were checking in orders (which releases the child), then accessing and changing the parent order from Ancillary orders. This lead to some funky things in the system, such as revised orders defaulting to 99,999 occurences. The recommended change order process, using Verify orders, should still be used and this does not change that. What changes is that if you attempt to change an order in Ancillary orders, you will not see the change order icon and therefore will not be able to make the change in that manner.

Until Specified Orders: Since "go live" we have struggled with what to do with the problem with "until specified" orders. The problem was that the Order Composer which is used by MD's to detail and tailor their orders for imaging had a section in it called Frequency. In that section were some things that we depend on for things like your Schedule Orders report, but it also contained that nasty "until specified" button. We could not remove the button without removing things that our build relied on in RADIANT. There was a domino effect for making this change, and it was fairly complex. The starting point was removing the entire frequency section, so that the providers would no longer have the "until specified" button available. In order to replace what we needed from that section, a question was built and plugged into all of the imaging procedures that asked the MD to validate the Date the exam was to be performed. This essentially blew up how our Schedule Orders Report was designed to function. So we had to restructure how the Orders report figured out when an order was supposed to be performed. New filters were created to show only those orders that were meant to be performed "today". However, as in any transition of workflow, we had some orders entered before the change and some ordered after. This caused an initial hiccup, as the new filter created by EPIC filtered out a few orders that we did not want filtered. The problem was quickly fixed and the report is working as intended. Keep in mind that not all modalities have chosen to even use a date filter on their Schedule Order Reports. Some modalities at SMH including CT, see all of their orders regardless of the expected exam date. They instead manually filter these on a daily basis.

thank you