Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

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Development Project Status: Completed

Total cost estimate (ex-Tax): 
$850
Due date for completion of this stage: 
10/04/2014
Release: 
1.8
Current Percentage Funded: 
100.00%
Project funding: 

Pledges can be made by email by clicking here.
Development will not commence until fully funded.

Project description: 

When adding patient referrals, the referring vet must be known by name.

If a customer doesn't know the name of the vet, it can only be determined by going to Suppliers|Information, and seeing which vets work at the clinic.

If the vet is not known, and a clinic has multiple vets, then being able to select the principal vet, or one relevant to the referral becomes important.

This project will improve this by:

1. extending the search facility to

  • allow searches on vet name or clinic name
  • display all matching vets belonging to a clinic if a clinic name is entered
  • display the clinic name in the list of matches

2. displaying the clinic name in the list of a patient's referrals

3. including any categories a vet has in their description, to aid selection E.g:

  • Dr J Smith (Principal Vet)
  • Dr K Jones (Opthamology)

JIRA: OVPMS-1487

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Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

Thanks very much to Sam for getting the ball rolling on this project. It is now 50% funded and would be an important enhancement for any clinics that take referrals so why not help make it a reality?

Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

Hi,

We have put in $ so this project should now be fully funded.

Cheers,

Adrian

Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

Yes it is!

Thank you very much for supporting this project Adrian.

Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

Hi Tim,

With this project, or just maybe something I need to change in my archetype, is it possible to have more than one 'active' referring vet at a time? When I add a new referring vet to a patient, it automatically makes the current one inactive. Sometimes, there are more than one referring vet and would like more than one active at a time.

Hope that makes sense,

Greta

Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

No - this is not supported. Whenever a patient is saved, there are rules that are triggered to ensure that there is only one referral active.

I believe this is for reporting reasons. There are a number of referral  reporting functions (e.g. party:getPatientReferralVet) that use the referral dates to determine which referral to select. If there were multiple active, then it won't know which one to select. As it is, I think a Referral From and Referral To active at the same time could confuse things.

Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

Hi,

So to allow multiple referrals would really have to be a seperate project then? Perhaps with the reports selecting the oldest referral?

Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

I think it would have to be a separate project. I don't think multiple referrals can be used in conjunction with the existing referral functions.

The relevant functions are:

1. party:getPatientReferralVet(patient) - Returns the referral vet for a patient, active at the current time.

2. party:getPatientReferralVet(act) - Returns the referral vet for an act, active at the act's start time.

With only one active From/To referral, you can invoke the above and get a mostly sensible result. E.g. if you have a Patient Letter, its creation date will determine which referral to use.

If there were multiple active referrals, how would reporting functions select which one to use? If you are referring a patient on to Vet A, that had previouly been referred to you by Vet B, the oldest referral approach wouldn't work.

 

Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

Hi Tim,

Could this problem be rectified by having a "preferred" box to tick for referrals? The preferred referral vet is ticked and gets used in reports? Or by marking them in an order (primary, secondary, tertiary?). If left unchanged we make a rule that the oldest or newest referral gets marked as the primary and used for such reports?

Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

That might work for the latest referral, but I don't think it would work well if you had a referral in a form for example, as these get generated every time you look at them.

Of course, the answer to this might be simply to not use referral functions in forms. The downside of this is that only patient Letters can be used, which means the database is required to store PDFs.

I'm leaning towards a solution that involves:

1. allows multiple active referrals

2. changes to the reporting functions to select the referal with the closest Start Date to that of either the document act being generated, or the current time. This can lead to ambiguities as its reliant on the creation order of the Referred From and Referred To records.

3. creating new Referral Letter and Referral Forms, which are essentially the same as the existing patient Letter and Forms but provides a mandatory Referral field.

The referral field will:

  • default to the most recent referral of the patient, active at the time of the
  • allow a new referral to be added
  • any new referral will be added to the patient's list of referrals (i.e. be displayed in Patients|Information)

4. changes to the reporting function to use the referral field if present. This removes any ambiguities as to which referral to select.
 

The Referral field could be added to the existing patient Letter/Form as an optional field, but in this case it should probably to blank rather than the most recent referral.

Re: Search for Referring Vet via Clinic

I've created a new project Multiple Active Referrals to discuss these requirements.

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