Hello and welcome. We're going to be talking about electronic health record applications. In this lecture, specifically, we're going to cover what those modules are and what issues you may encounter. The first application that many of our users will interact with, or interface with, is scheduling and registration. When we have our patient appointments, they're typically scheduled to seek clinicians or support staff in the clinic, a hospital outpatient department, or even in the inpatient setting. When we have those patients that are scheduled, they can either be seen with a person or a resource, such as a chemotherapy chair or an MRI machine. We have to make sure that those schedules are kept up to date, so that we can keep our patient flow running as smoothly and efficiently as possible. When we think about scheduling those visits, typically we're going to schedule them in the outpatient setting, or the clinic setting. In this case, we have our patients that are seen by a clinician or a support staff, as I mentioned before, but you can have that appointment occur in a facility. You can have a telemedicine or video visit, or you can discuss something specific with a provider over the phone. With that being said, there are certain types of appointments that a patient can be scheduled for and that is a follow-up visit. They can be seen for a nurse only visit. A wellness visit, for example, if you're having a physical that you need to have done once a year, you would come in for that, or you can have a vaccine done. The next application or module that you will encounter is related to the emergency department. This application is used by clinicians and support staff that take care of patients that need emergent or emergency care. When we have our patients that are seen here, they can be admitted or placed in observation. What that means is we're monitoring them for a specific reason, over a certain time period. Typically, when they're monitored over this particular time period, we're doing additional testing for that particular patient. Finally, when we think about the emergency department, everything is happening in a rapid fashion. That means test results are going to be ordered and their results will come back very quickly. When we think about our inpatient documentation, that is related to patients that are admitted to the hospital. This is going to make sure that all of our hospital staff are aware of patient changes, we could have different labs order, x-rays, or other imaging studies. Also, when we have patients in the hospitals, they can have a consult done, meaning you have a provider, that is a specialist, that can come to a particular unit or department to see a patient and provide their expertise of how to take care of that patient. It's also used to manage tasks for our staff. Now, when we think about the inpatient documentation, I mentioned imaging and naturally, that's the next module that we're going to talk about. When it comes to that, we're thinking about all of our imaging procedures. Our CT scans, our x-rays, or our MRIs. That's mainly done in our imaging departments, but sometimes we also have portable machines that can be brought to the patient's room, so that particular procedure can be performed in the room. The next application that we're going to think about is our pharmacy. When we think about that, it's used to dispense medications for patients that are seen in either at the hospital or the clinic. Typically, that staff that we think about as it relates to the pharmacy is a pharmacist or a pharmacy technician, and it's used by all of our staff members. But, one thing that we have to keep in mind here are only clinicians with appropriate licenses or agreed upon protocols, can order or administer medications. That's something that's very important for you to keep in mind, because depending on the facility, you may receive calls about whether or not a particular clinician can place an order or not for the patient and sometimes they can receive an error or a warning. The next module that we're going to discuss is the operating room. Now, this is used to document on what occurs when a patient has surgery or a procedure completed. We also utilize the operating room in the event that we have to do pre-surgical or pre-admissions testing and when we deliver infants. When we think about our operating room, typically multiple staff members will work in this particular setting, including our anesthesiologists that administer the medication that puts our patients to sleep. When we think about this, our operating room module typically interfaces with our anesthesia module because they're very, very interconnected. To recap, we talked about the common EHR applications. We talked about scheduling and registration. When you're thinking about this particular module, sometimes a user may have an issue scheduling a patient. Sometimes, when we think about registrations, certain fields may be improper or not necessary for documentation. So a person may receive an alert stating that they don't have their security document in that particular field and you have to keep those things in mind. Where we're thinking about our outpatient visit, that's when we have clinicians that are seeing our patients in our clinic setting, and we have to make sure that department is available for scheduling. For example, we have to make sure our clinicians have schedules in those departments. We also have to ensure that when our patients are seen that they can have the appropriate messages or alerts firing. We have to be sure that the flow from scheduling to being seen by the clinician to being checked out are all functioning appropriately. The next module that we talked about was our Emergency Department. Because things are happening in quick fashion, we have to make sure that our labs can be ordered quickly, that our imaging studies are being resulted fast, and that we don't have any interruptions in getting that information to our clinicians just as quickly as they're putting it in. When we think about our inpatient documentation that spans multiple roles from our doctors to our consulting physicians and our nurses that are also on the floor. When we have inpatient documentation, we have to think about notes that are being documented, labs that are being ordered, and alerts that are firing to make sure that we're managing patient care. You may receive several calls about each of these particular elements. When we think about our imaging, again, that's when our patients are having procedures done or imaging studies taken care of. Sometimes the room may not be available to be scheduled. We may not be able to document the appropriate staff performing the procedure or we may have an instance in which the image itself doesn't come through because we're working with multiple systems. We also have our pharmacy module, so we're working to make sure that all of our medications or IV fluids are ordered appropriately for our patient. Sometimes you may receive a call in the event that a clinician can't order or administer a medication appropriately, and we have to understand our triage why that is and get it routed to the appropriate team to take care of, so that patient care isn't interrupted. Lastly, we talked about our operating room. This is where our patients receive surgery. Also we have instances where our anesthesia module is also working interconnectedly with the operating module. Sometimes the information isn't flowing appropriately when the patient is receiving anesthesia. Sometimes our surgeons can't operate on their patients appropriately because they don't have the correct documentation tools. In any of those circumstances, we have to make sure that at the end of the day, our clinicians are functioning appropriately. Even if we don't have access to the medical record, they're still going to be able to take care of our patient, but we want to make sure that all of that information is taken care of appropriately. With that, that concludes this lecture and we'll see you in the next one.
