Version 11.3

Communicare has a new look splash screen and login form. The login form contains all the existing functionality with the addition of the selection of 'workstation location'. (See Communicare Login.)

Also, new icons have been used on the main toolbar buttons (see Main Toolbar). These changes are the begining of a whole refresh to the product package.

The To Do List in the clinical record now shows the due date for recalls and referrals with less than 28 days to go as amber (similar to the way regular medications are displayed in the Medication Summary). This is to alert the user to recalls and referrals which are due soon so that they can be considered for completion as part of this consultation rather than waiting for the patient to attend again.

Due dates for overdue recalls and referrals are shown as red. Note also that unreviewed investigation results on the detail tab have their dates shown as red to draw attention to them.

Communicare now has the Healthcare Identifiers Service (HI Service) integrated into Biographics. Users can manually enter a known Individual Healthcare Identifier (IHI) and have it validated with Medicare, or automatically initiate a search for an IHI when saving patients with enough detail for reliable retrieval. Valid IHI's can also be seen when selecting patients in Patient Search. Correct setup is required before the module can be used, which includes the deployment of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 on all client workstations. Further detail on the new functionality can be found in Biographics and HI Service.

Following the changes necessary to prevent users undermining the status of an incomplete item by returning to it and completing required qualifiers (this must now always be done from the recall in the To Do List) referrals are no longer allowed to have required qualifiers. Referrals appear in the To Do List with their own logic for completion. Any local referral items with required qualifiers are reported in the Database Consistency Check and any required qualifiers should be set as not required. Future attempts to make a qualifier on a referral clinical item as required are prevented.

All Communicare SQL reports can be exported to Excel but some are designed only for export to Excel (i.e. there is no print layout). These reports typically either have many more fields than can be shown on a page of A4 paper or the data lends itself to further manipulation by a trained Excel user (e.g. ordering, filtering and the creation of graphs and charts). Several reports of this nature have been added in this release:

Report | Electronic Claims | Bulk Bills Status Report - this report shows all the information displayed in the Bulk Bills Status window when no filters have been applied (i.e. excluding fully paid claims and those for services more than two years old). The report also shows the status of the patient's Medicare card, the home locality of the patient, the status of the claim and any error code associated with the claim. Where a claim has not yet been made the names of all providers on that service are shown and where a claim has been attempted the claimant is shown. It will be invaluable for Medicare claims staff wanting to prioritise how they follow up on unclaimed services.

Report | Procedures | Performed by date with qualifiers (export) - this very versatile report prompts for a procedure and then shows all such procedures added between two dates with the qualifiers presented as columns rather than rows. By exporting this to Excel and removing the first header row the data can be ordered and filtered depending on responses to qualifiers on the procedure. This report can be used to analyse responses to qualifiers by looking for omissions or responses with specific values. Up to fifty qualifier types on a single clinical item will be displayed.

Pathology results for structured numeric values (e.g. eGFR values like '\>90') are now imported into Communicare. These will now display in the qualifier summary along with any comparator operator, separator operator and values. (e.g. greater than '\>90', less than '\<100', range '10-100', ratio '1:2' etc.).

Qualifier charts have been enhanced to be able to effectively display structured numeric values that describe 'greater than', 'greater than or equal to', 'less than' and 'less than or equal to' values. See Qualifier Charts.

In addition to this, if multiple qualifiers are graphed, users can select to turn on/off display one or more of the qualifier data sets by clicking on the legend checkboxes.

Communicare now supports importing Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) documents (HL7 v3) specified as Specialist Letters and Discharge Summaries via the regular investigations drop folder. (See Electronic Results.) These CDA documents are completely integrated into existing workflows and can be accessed from the clinical record or the Communicare In-Tray in the same way as other electronic documents.