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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.
Sending and Receiving Documents
Using Communicare you can send and receive documents and results electronically.
Secure Messaging
Secure Message Delivery (SMD) is the government standard for sending medical documents and messages securely and safely.

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.
        Secure Messaging
        Secure Message Delivery (SMD) is the government standard for sending medical documents and messages securely and safely.
        Intramail
        Use the intramail system to send secure internal electronic messages within Communicare.
      - 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.

Secure Messaging

Secure Message Delivery (SMD) is the government standard for sending medical documents and messages securely and safely.

Only certain sites can send and receive documents using Secure Messaging. These are available from the Enterprise Provider Directory (EPD).

Communicare integrates with a third party application called Argus to send documents and messages.

To enable Secure Messaging you will need:

A local installation of the Argus application, version 6.0.15 or higher
Configuration of the local Argus and Communicare applications, see System Parameters - Secure Messaging
A valid security certificate for your Site/HPIO
An address entry for your site in the National Health Services Directory
Access to the EPD setup in Communicare, see System Parameters - Web Services

If you want to enable Secure Messaging functionality in Communicare, contact Communicare Support for further information.

Sending a document

A document can be sent to only one recipient. After it has been sent, the document, recipient, sender and patient details cannot be changed, however, the document can be sent again.

Resending a document

While sending a document, if some error occurs, either on the Communicare side or Argus end, click Resend to try to send the document again.

14 November 2023