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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 can be received from external sources, sent from Communicare or added to Communicare.

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 summary
      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 can be received from external sources, sent from Communicare or added to Communicare.
      - Read-only documents
        Read-only documents in Communicare cannot be modified under any circumstances.
      - Add documents
        Documents are the electronic reflection of printed material that is important enough to be recorded in the patient's file. Only add documents to Communicare that cannot be encoded using normal clinical items.
      - Send documents
        Using Communicare you can send documents electronically.
      - Receive documents
        Using Communicare you can receive documents electronically.
      - Delete documents
        Use the Browse Documents window to delete documents.
      - Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)
        Communicare can send and receive CDA documents.
      - Combined Address Book
        The combined address book stores local address book entries and allows you to search multiple, online provider directories.
      - EPD address book
        The EPD address book was replaced in Communicare V22.2 by the combined address book to support searching the local address book and online provider directories simultaneously, and secure message exchange.
      - Secure Messaging
        Secure Message Delivery (SMD) is the government standard for sending medical documents and messages securely and safely.
  - 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.

Documents

Documents can be received from external sources, sent from Communicare or added to Communicare.

Documents and access rights

All documents are subject to Viewing Rights. This means that if a document is marked as highly sensitive and you do not have the right to see highly sensitive data you will not be able to see the document. However, all documents with no viewing right assigned (except incoming electronic documents) will be visible to all users.

Documents will always be visible to users inside the clinical record if the users have the appropriate level of access to see them.

Note: Documents such as letters created with no viewing right are visible only to users who belong to a user group that has the Electronic Documents system right enabled. Incoming documents do not have a viewing right until one is assigned and are not visible to users unless they belong to a user group with the Electronic Documents system right. This approach prevents potentially sensitive information being visible to everyone.

Documents and system rights

System rights assign the security access level for using Communicare modules. There are two system rights in Communicare that deal with Documents:

Document Scanning - users can scan documents into Communicare from the Documents and Results window and from within the clinical record.
Electronic Documents - users can create any outgoing document from the Documents and Results window. All users can create outgoing documents from within the clinical record. This system right also allows users to see incoming documents that do not have an access right assigned. This means only users with the Electronic Documents system right can see the incoming documents as they arrive. After incoming documents have been reviewed, they are visible according to their newly assigned viewing right.

Table 1. Summary of document access
Document type	With Viewing Right	Without Viewing Right
Scanned document	Visible only to those with that viewing right	Visible only to those with `Electronic Documents` system right
Incoming document	Visible only to those with that viewing right	Visible only to those with `Electronic Documents` system right
Other documents (letters created in Communicare)	Visible only to those with that viewing right	Visible only to those with `Electronic Documents` system right

15 March 2024