It’s spring and time to clean up your Picis system! Doing an annual review of dictionaries, tables, sections, forms in both booking and case record is a good way to keep the system in tip-top shape. One of the things folks commonly complain about is the inactive options in dictionaries and tables. Making those option fall to the bottom of the list is a great way to keep users from selecting those options e.g. adding zz to the beginning of the mnemonic. Since the entries fall in alphabetic order the “zz” at the beginning of the name will ensure those options fall to the bottom of the list.
OR Manager has 5 manage routines that are an effective way to sort, select and queue data. The manage routines come with standard fields to select to sort through the data, but the most powerful part of the manage routine is to be able to write your own query with ANY data field in the system whether it be a standard field or a custom field. With Custom Field Select, the user can determine what field they want to query and how they wish to sort the data. Then the query can be saved and recalled at a later date.
Spring is also a good time to refresh users on best practices for documentation and scheduling. Most hospitals have a late start day and spending 10-15 minutes every week going over some best practices or quick tips gives the users some new tools to optimize their processes. One quick tip that I mention at HealthChecks that most users forget is that for every drop-down field that is searchable by a * search, two words can be used to narrow down the search. For example, if you are looking for a “Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy” procedure and want to narrow down the search type in “*lap,chole” and the system will only show options with those two values. It really makes finding entries in a large table or dictionary easier.
Another clean up opportunity is with SmarTrack. EVERY hospital that I visit typically builds SmarTrack screens during implementation and then folks get used to them and never update them. SmarTrack has literally hundreds of options to make communication seamless. Explore what would make the tracking board in each area better. Check to see if a department with SmarTrack is still using a white dry erase board to track people or things and see if those can be incorporated in the SmarTrack board.
Finally, it seems everyone ALWAYS needs to clean up the procedure dictionary and preference card dictionary. This is a daunting task and seems to get started and never quite finished. Picis has developed some tools that can assist in the clean up of preference card and procedure dictionaries. Reach out to Pat Day learn more about the great promotion going on until June 15, 2021.
Join us next month as we discuss how PAT (Pre Admission Testing) can communicate electronically with Anesthesia using Picis Preop Manager.
-Theresa Sullivan
