Hi all,
My practice has been using paper forms to order interventional procedures and surgeries for patients and we are trying to go fully electronic. We just switched from the EXE version to the Cloud version.
What we ideally want to do is put in some sort of procedure order (i.e. a knee injection) that is templated out to have certain set things (i.e. the matching CPT code which won’t change for specific procedures and should be automatically linked) but also allow me to link a patient diagnosis and leave me room to add variable things like at which hospital site, with or without sedation, which knee, which medication, any special clearances needed, etc. We want to do this for all our most common procedures. We then want a way to send that from the ordering providers to the surgery coordinators who are resources in ECW. Ideally this would be trackable and saved in ECW somewhere in case there are issues so we can find where the problems are. The surgery centers and hospitals that the coordinators send to are all external so beyond this step I’m less concerned.
With paper it was easy to have everything on there and just circle things but of course papers get lost and can’t be tracked so that’s not a good long-term solution.
My practice administrator tried to set up all the procedures under “Procedures” in the main menu. I have tried “ordering” these procedures just like I would diagnostic imaging but when I do this all the templated items above including the CPT codes are nowhere to be found. All I can do is link a “procedure” (at least the procedures are showing up), make a “future order” with an appropriate diagnosis and then “assign” the order to my surgery coordinator. This doesn’t work because all the templated items are gone which leaves me to type everything in manually for every order and defeats the purpose of having streamlined templates (will lead to errors, redundant work, and lost time).
As of right now, doing things this is way is significantly more work per patient than paper, has caused errors, and everyone hates it.
So, am I doing something incorrectly here or is this not the way to go about these procedure orders? Someone at another practice mentioned “specialty forms” but I have no idea how to set that up. I’m sure there is an easy way to do this.
