Investigation Management

Investigations are any internal or external clinical test or procedure.  Investigation management deals with how these are created and communicated to and from the investigation device or supplier.

• Unlimited number of Investigation Types can be defined.
• Investigation Types define specific procedures and/or test services as well as who provides the investigation services.
• Investigation Types can be linked to specific products so they are automatically created when billed to a specific patient.
• Investigation Types can be linked to specific document templates to allow automatic merging and printing of supplier customisable request forms.
• Request forms cna be easily re-printed.
• Investigations are assigned a unique Request Id.
• The OpenVPMS Automatic Document import feature allows any supplier who can deliver results electronically in a file format to automatically attach these to the Investigation. 
• Investigation status is automatically updated from In progress to Received on electronic receipt of results.
• Users can update Investigation status to Completed, Preliminary, Final, Cancelled.
• Investigations support document revisions for Intermediate and Final results and/or non cummulative results for multiple procedures.
• Investigations are any attached results are displayed in the Patients Medical record as part of the visit details.  
• An Investigation workspace is provided to allow users to list all Investigations by status and/or date range.  This displays date, patient, supplier, investigation yype, request Id, status and any attached results.  This is ideal for monitoring both internal and external investigation requests.

Please note there has been some discussion on the forums about enhancing the Investigation Management functions to include:

• Electronic requesting.  Allow specific Investigation types to send electronic investigation requests to internal or extrenal suppliers.
• DICOM MWL.  Allow DICOM modalities such as Digital Xray and Ultrsound machines etc to query investigation lists to add to their work queues eliminating time and errors re-entering information on the equipment console.
• DICOM Query/Retrieve.  Allow specific Investigation Types to query/retrieve images diretcly from a PACS server rather than duplicate images in the OpenVPMS database.