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Administrative
Add and manage patients, manage appointments and manage transport.
Patients
Communicare uses the term Patient to refer to the clients of a health service.
Browse For Duplicate Patient Records
Use Browse For Duplicate Records to locate all patient records that could be duplicates, based on name, sex and date of birth.

Administrative
Add and manage patients, manage appointments and manage transport.
- Patients
  Communicare uses the term Patient to refer to the clients of a health service.
  - Biographics
  - Information Sharing Consent
    Health Services have access to any information they have recorded internally. If you have a single database in your organisation used by multiple health services, you can also share information recorded by other health services with the clients' consent.
  - Patient Search
    Use the patient search to select and work with the patient's record, or create a new record.
  - Browse For Duplicate Patient Records
    Use Browse For Duplicate Records to locate all patient records that could be duplicates, based on name, sex and date of birth.
  - Adding a New Patient
    When a patient first makes contact with your encounter place, and before you provide a service to that patient, add a patient record.
  - Current Status
    Use Current status to indicate a person's primary relationship to your health service.
  - Group Memberships
    Use the Group Membership window to review the dates on which a patient joined or exited a group.
  - Deleting a Patient
    You can delete fictitious patients from Communicare.
  - Duplicate patient checks
    When a patient is added to Communicare, a series of checks are done in an attempt to identify and prevent duplicate entries.
  - Recording the death of a patient
    In Communicare, record when a patient dies. Deceased patients are excluded from many reports but will continue to be included if not marked as deceased.
  - Patient Merge
    When a patient has been recorded twice in Communicare, use Patient Merge to combine the two records.
  - Patient alert
    If an alert is added to a patient's biographic information, a popup alert is displayed when the patient's record is opened.
  - Background Work window
    The background work window is displayed when Communicare is busy and you must wait for the described background process to complete before proceeding with other actions.
  - Registering patients with MHR
    If the My Health Record Assisted Registration module is enabled in System Rights and you belong to a user group with the My Health Record Assisted Registration system right, you can register patients with My Health Record.
- Appointments
  Use Communicare appointments to book future appointments and record services provided without an appointment, for example, walk-in patients.
- Transport
  Communicare offers two ways of managing transport services.

Browse For Duplicate Patient Records

Use Browse For Duplicate Records to locate all patient records that could be duplicates, based on name, sex and date of birth.

The following business rules apply:

All patient names are considered when matching names but only the surname and the first initial are used to match. The surname needs only to be a fuzzy match (e.g. "FILIPS" = "PHILLIPS", "WALIAMS" = "WILLIAMS", "DELL" = "DELIA", etc.). Patients with no first name are included if the surname has a fuzzy match.
Patients are only excluded by sex if each patient has a different sex - if one or both have no sex recorded, they are included.
Patients are only excluded by date of birth if each patient has an age that differs by more than 2% either way. This effectively means that for a patient who is 50 years old, the search includes other patients who are up to one year older and one year younger; for a 25 year old this is narrowed to six months older or six months younger.

For information about how the merge is accomplished, see Patient Merge.

To find and merge duplicate records:

Select Patient > Browse For Duplicate Records.
In the Browse For Duplicate Patient Records window, the potential duplicate records are listed in the top and bottom grids. Click Next to step through the records.
If you have checked the records and agree that two records are duplicates, ensure that the record you want to keep is in the top grid and the record that you want to merge into it is in the bottom grid and click Merge the patient selected below into this patient.
In the Confirm window, click Yes.

The records are merged.

Not all duplicate records will be identified. If you know of two records that are definitely duplicates, but have not been identified, use Patient Merge. See Patient Merge for more information.

14 November 2023