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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.
Read-only documents
Read-only documents in Communicare cannot be modified under any circumstances.

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.

Read-only documents

Read-only documents in Communicare cannot be modified under any circumstances.

Any of the following conditions will make a document read-only:

The document is not outgoing, that is, it is incoming, or hasn't been created by your organisation)
The document is a Care Plan, Care Plan Template or Attachment
The document has been sent or is being sent
The document has been saved for more than eight hours
All Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) documents become read-only as soon as they have been saved.

Editing read-only documents

You cannot modify a document once it has become read-only, although the details section may be changed or updated. However, if the document was not an incoming document, attachment or CDA document, you can create a copy of the document and edit that. To create a copy:

Open the Clinical Record for the patient.
On the Detail tab, locate the document you want to edit and double-click the document.
Click Create New to open a new document that is identical to the original document, and can now be edited.

The new document will be linked to the current service, and the old document will remain unchanged.

14 November 2023