2019/08/30 Release Notes (Admin)

New Edit / New Patient Page (Demographic Page)




A new version of new/edit patient page has now been released. This is automatically available to all users except Reset Life who use a custom demographic page. The previous New/Edit patient page is no longer being supported. This change was in response to sites asking for the patient demographics page entry and navigation to be more efficient and for data to be more visible at a glance.
We have compressed the layout to make content easier to find and reordered fields to maximise space and tab ordered data entry.
Some checkboxes now have hover tooltips to reduce wording on the page so if you don't know what a checkbox means, hover over it.
The page has been optimised for data entry by setting tab order and cursor focus where applicable and additional content such as Next of Kin, other contributor and claimant details are now entered via a popup rather than taking up space on the page. The Keyboard shortcut Ctrl + S can be used to save the page at any time.
The mandatory field checks are as per previous.

Some buttons have been replaced with icons, with markup to icons on how to Edit patient name and View Name History.
Other changes include: To speed data entry, gender is now a single letter rather than a radio button. On very first selection of patient title, the page will set a default Gender (e.g. Mr selected will set gender to M) - however the gender will NOT reset with further changes to Title so you will have to modify it thereafter.

Preferred phone number is now a set of checkboxes beside the phone column rather than a dropdown list.

To enter postal address, you can toggle to the Envelope Icon beside the street address.

Medicare validation is now an icon of or a tick or cross depending on Medicare response.



Eligibility information shows in a tooltip over the icon.

Preferred name is a new field. This preferred name field is not populating elsewhere in the system but we are planning to include it in the demographic string in brackets after the patient name in a future release.





NZ users have a place to enter NHI beside the MRN:




and default NZ regions in the address dropdown. USA users continue to have the USA states in the address dropdown


The Organisation Preferences page has been updated to reflect some of these changes with a Demographic preferences section at the top of the page. If you wish to collect additional social demographics (such as lives alone, refugee status, education, income status) and/or sexual orientation, please set the relevant preferences in your Org Preferences page:




If you cannot access this page, please contact your site administrator as senior admin staff typically can modify this page. These extra sections will display on the New/Edit patient page as shown below:



For those sites with the right to "Quick referral" function, you can also add referrals via this page but you cannot edit referrals from this page.





Resolved Issue – Patient name not showing on deleted task list

A bug was found in the ‘Tasks’ module where if a task was deleted, the patient details in the ‘Associated Patient’ column were no longer visible. This issue has now been resolved.





Increased size of patient Phone Numbers on Record Summary

The patient phone numbers on the top of the Record Summary page were hard to read due to size and formatting. They are now presented in a bold font with larger spacing in between. This will only change format if the phone number is 10 characters long and without any spaces. For overseas users who are free texting phone numbers, your phone number format will not be affected.










New data parameters for ‘Patient Gender’

In the ‘Letters / Correspondence’ module, there has been a new data parameter of ‘Patient Sex Abbrev’ added for a more compact view on certain patient labels. This will appear as the first letter of the gender.







Resolved Issue: Quick 'Add New Patient' from Edit Appointment (Patient Lookup)

An issued was found on the quick 'Add New Patient' from the 'Edit/New Appointment' page when an alphanumeric MRN# was entered. As it is very uncommon for an MRN to be alphanumeric, this is unlikely to have impacted to many users in the production system, although the issue has now been resolved.



Protocol Identifier now being sent as EviQ identifier field.

For our sites that require the Cancer Institute data in the Encounter Summary export message, the Protocol Identifier that is being sent is now the the EviQ Identifier field.



Changes to the 'Delete Task' feature

The 'Delete Task' feature previously included an alert 'Are you sure' window pop-up page to confirm the deletion. This was a double confirmation so the alert window has now been removed.



New Organisation Preferences of 'Copy Epi ID to MRN field if empty'

We have added a new Organisation Preferences of 'Copy Epi ID to MRN field if empty'. If ticked, when creating a new patient, leave the MRN blank and when the record is saved, the Epi ID will be populated to the MRN field as well. If there is a number in the MRN field already, it will not copy the Epi ID. To do this, switch on the Organisation Preferences via the 'New Patient page' or 'Hospital Booking Wizard New Patient Page'. It is important to note, when saving via the Hospital Booking Wizard, the patient demographics string does not update immediately with the MRN on closing of the Wizard.






Outlook Integration - Multi-clinician Appointments now available
For sites using Outlook calendar synchronisation, the 'Multi-Clinician' appointment booking is now available for the other clinicians on the appointment to have their appointments also synch'd to Outlook.



New 'Delete' function in Referrals / Correspondence

We have added a new role-based permission to allow Practice Managers to delete unwanted documents from the 'Sent Letter's' section of the 'Referrals / Correspondence' module.





New Report - Number of Patients seen for any given time period

This report outlines the number of visits attended in a time period for both Inpatient and Outpatient visits, excluding a range of 'Admin' visits such as 'File Note', 'Pharmacy Billing' etc. The report has been titled 'Patient Visit List' and has been enabled for all users under the category 'Administrative Reports'




New message interface with HealthLink'

EpiSoft is now enabled for the send and receive of messages via HealthLink. We will be contacting initial sites to complete this setup and start receiving / sending messages.




Issue Resolved - 'Show 24 hours' on Appointment (Clinician) Calendar

An issue was identified where clinicians who DID NOT have a roster were appearing on the calendar when 'Show 24 hours..' was applied. This issue has now been resolved.




New Report - 'Patient Contact Details' & 'Patient Additional Demographics'

Two new reports have been enabled for all sites. The first report titled 'Patient Contact Details' includes all contact details of the patient. Patient Additional Demographics was created at the request of a site that are required to identify their indigenous patients for accreditation purposes. These reports will be visible under the Patient General reports category.



Issue Resolved - Submitting HDMS Report to WA Health (Western Australian users ONLY)

We have made some recent changes to the arrangement of the clinical data to eliminate data submission issues. The 'Diagnosis' and 'Morphology' lines are now ordered by their display sequence.

For WA sites reporting to the state government (HMDS Report), a number of the fields only mandatory for WA were not validating in some circumstances resulting in these being left blank. These validators have all been amended to ensure maximum data population for state reporting in the admission and discharge pages.




Decryption layer on data fields


Upon migrating our infrastructure over to AWS, a number of our data fields in Episoft became double-encrypted. To increase performance across the system, while still remaining at the highest level of security, we have removed the decryption which was previously applied to a number of fields in EpiSoft.