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Encounters
Open a service recording for patient interactions and add clinical items, record progress notes, prescribe medications, review investigations, write referrals and manage recalls.
Clinical Support
Investigations and documents
Communicare receives pathology and imaging results, letters and other documents electronically and sends documents and letters electronically using HL7 messages.
Documents
Documents are the electronic reflection of printed material that is important enough to be recorded in the patient's file. Usually a clinician will want to scan documents into Communicare that cannot be encoded using normal clinical items.
Attachments
You can attach clinical and related documents sourced from email or elsewhere to a patient's clinical record as PDF documents.

Encounters
Open a service recording for patient interactions and add clinical items, record progress notes, prescribe medications, review investigations, write referrals and manage recalls.
- Encounters
  Record patient encounters in Communicare using any one of the following methods.
- Medications
  This topic covers all Medications Management functionality within Communicare.
- Clinical Support
  - Investigations and documents
    Communicare receives pathology and imaging results, letters and other documents electronically and sends documents and letters electronically using HL7 messages.
    - Documents and results
      Use the Documents and Results window to display internal, incoming and outgoing documents and incoming results for any patient at your service.
    - Investigations
    - Documents
      Documents are the electronic reflection of printed material that is important enough to be recorded in the patient's file. Usually a clinician will want to scan documents into Communicare that cannot be encoded using normal clinical items.
      - Browsing documents
        Use the Browse Documents window to process scanned documents and manage letters including scanning new documents, writing new letters and viewing, deleting and amending details (but not the scanned image or the date) attached to a document.
      - Scanning documents
        You can scan new documents directly from the main toolbar or from within a Clinical Record.
      - Reviewing documents
        You can review incoming or scanned documents from a patient's clinical record or more generally from Documents and Results.
      - Writing letters and referrals
        You can write letters and referrals from a patient's clinical record. You can also write letters from Documents and Results or from File > Documents.
      - Read-only documents
        Read-only documents in Communicare cannot be modified under any circumstances.
      - Deleting documents
        Use the Browse Documents window to delete documents.
      - Letter viewer
        Use the Letter Viewer to view the contents of a document without printing it.
      - Selecting a template
        Use this window to select a template.
      - Attachments
        You can attach clinical and related documents sourced from email or elsewhere to a patient's clinical record as PDF documents.
      - Sending and Receiving Documents
        Using Communicare you can send and receive documents and results electronically.
      - Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)
        Communicare can send and receive CDA documents.
  - Referral Management
    Manage incoming internal and external referrals from a single list.
  - Birth Notifications
    For customers who belong to the Western Australian Country Health Service, use the Birth Notifications module to manage notifications related to births from a single list.
  - Recalls
    Recalls are the elements that make up a care plan. Recalls can be either generated automatically by Communicare or manually created by the user.
  - Datasets
    Datasets are a user-friendly coding system, giving health professionals a standardised way to record data and report on data entered in a patient’s clinical record.

Attachments

You can attach clinical and related documents sourced from email or elsewhere to a patient's clinical record as PDF documents.

You can then view these documents in Communicare alongside the patient's data.

A valid attachment is a document that meets the following criteria:

It is a PDF document with the extension .pdf. If the document is not a PDF, it must be converted to PDF first before it can be attached. Talk to your administrator about the best way to do this.
It is less than or equal to the size limit for documents, the default is 512KB. Documents larger than this cannot be stored in the database.

Adding a document

To add a document:

Either:
- On the clinical record, drag and drop the document or click Attachment on the clinical record toolbar.
  You cannot drag and drop folders or multiple files. Drag and drop also doesn't work in the following circumstances:
  - When dragging from a local desktop to a remote desktop session.
  - When dragging from a local desktop to Communicare published as an application via Citrix.
  - When dragging an attachment within an email application (such as Microsoft Outlook) to Communicare.
- In Documents and Results > Scanned Documents and Attachments tab, click Attachment and select the document you want to attach.
In the PDF Viewer, you can review the document, select the document date, add an appropriate comment, and also choose the viewing right and topic. The comment will default to the file name (without the path or extension), but can be edited.
The date will default to the time the attachment was last modified and cannot be set to a future date or no date.
Click Save.

Once attached, the document cannot be changed.

Tip: Take care not to save the same attachment to a patient's record multiple times.

Opening a document

Attached documents are listed on the Detail tab of the clinical record, prefixed with Attachment and are also displayed on the progress notes. For example: Example attachment in progress notes

If the document is unreviewed, it is also added to the count of unreviewed documents in the banner.

To open the document, click Documents in the banner or double-click the item in the progress notes or on the Detail tab.

You can edit the comment, viewing right and topic if required.

15 November 2023