Search for an address

The Combined Address Book is displayed whenever you need to add an addressee.

For example, from a patient's clinical record, you might add a referral to an oral surgeon at a hospital and use the Address Book to find the hospital and surgeon. The addressee's details are included in the letter or eReferral automatically, or you may change those details before sending or printing.

Note: To search the online provider directories, and import to and edit the local address book, you must belong to a user group that has the Address Book Maintenance system right. You can still send to providers already included in your local address book if you don't have this system right.

Use the Address Book to search online provider directories for an individual or organisation and create a record in your local address book. You can only send referrals and so on to addressees included in your local address book. Entries in the local address book are displayed when you first open the Address Book window.

In V22.2 and later, Communicare can use the Secure Message Exchange and CCareQueue_SMD to search online provider directories (SMD vendors), including Argus and HealthLink, and to send and receive secure messages using HL7 V2.4 or HL7 V2.3.1.

An individual provider may have multiple entries in separate online provider directories, depending on which services they are subscribed to and their:
  • Speciality
  • Organisation
  • Location
  • SMD vendor
An organisation may have multiple entries in online provider directories, depending on which services they are subscribed to and the following criteria:
  • Practice name
  • Location
    • Organisations can have one or more healthcare services at a location
    • Multiple specialties at a single location can be one healthcare service, or multiple specialities with the same organisation and location
  • SMD vendor
Table 1. Address book search options
Search criteria Online Local Notes
Individual ✓ ✓ Enter all or part of an individual's name.
Organisation ✓ ✓ To return an organisation, specify the complete organisation name. When searching by organisation name, individuals of that organisation are returned only if they have been added to the local address book.
Department ✗ ✓ Specify departments for organisations only.
Specialty ✓ ✓ Use to search for individuals by specialty. For online searches, select from the list of specialties. For local searches, you can also search using free text.
Tip: Communicare lists the entire set of SNOMED CT practitioner roles in the Specialty field, but HealthLink and Argus support different subsets of these roles. If no results are returned for the specialty for which you are searching, try a similar specialty.
Service type ✗ ✓ Service types are maintained by Communicare Administrators:
  • Admissions - used when adding an admission clinical item type to a patient clinical record and for Admission reports
  • Referrals - used when adding a referral clinical item type to a patient clinical record and for Referral reports
  • Transport - used when adding a stop to a transport service
  • Pathology - used when adding investigation requests. Also set whether request forms for this place are printed to plain paper or to a preprinted request form. The requester can override this default when making a request.
  • Radiology - used when adding radiology requests. Also set whether request forms for this place are printed to plain paper or to a preprinted request form. The requester can override this default when making a request.
  • Billing - used when recording a Payer of type Other for private billing
  • Supplier - used when recording an Imprest stock supplier

For example, administrators can set your preferred pathology and imaging providers which are then listed in the Investigation Provider list in the Investigation Request.
To search for an individual or organisation in your local address book or the online provider directories:
  1. If you've been redirected from a letter, referral, clinical item and so on, go to the next step, otherwise select File > Address Book.
  2. In the Address Book window, enter the name of an individual or organisation in the Search field. If this search returns too many results, enter additional search criteria in the appropriate fields.
    Tip: Only those results that match all the search criteria you specify are returned.
    • For most searches, in the Search field, enter the name of the provider for whom you want to search, or the healthcare service organisation for which you want to search.
      Tip: If you are unsure of a provider's other information, such as their suburb, include only their name.
    • In the Location field, enter a suburb, state or postcode.
    • For individual's, from the Specialty list, select a provider's speciality.
    • In the Provider number field, enter the Medicare Online Claiming provider number associated with a provider for an encounter place.
    • For local address book searches, to search by department or service type, click More Options:
      • In the Department field, enter a department name.
      • For administrators wanting to maintain preferred suppliers and so on, from the Service Type list, select the service type you want to review. For more information, see Table 1.
  3. To search both your local address book and the online provider directories, set Search Online.
    Tip: To display all entries in your local address book, deselect Search online, and don't set any search criteria.
  4. Click Search iconSearch.
The results from your search are listed in the Address Book window. Each entry displays one of two icons:
  • Edit iconEdit - this entry is already included in your local address book. Addresses included in your local address book are listed first. To edit the entry, click Edit iconEdit
  • Save iconSave - this online entry is yet to be saved to your local address book. To save a provider or organisation from an online provider directory to your local address book, click Save iconSave.
    Tip: Add a contact to your local Communicare address book for a provider at each organisation that you want to contact. For example, if you want to refer patients to Dr Kidman at both State Health and Cardicare, add both results. If you add a result that is already included in the local address book, it is not added again, but the details are refreshed.

Example search results in the Address Book window
Individuals and organisations are listed with addresses included in your local address book listed first, then alphabetically by name.
  • If an individual provider is registered at more than one organisation, or with more than one SMD vendor, they will be listed more than once.
  • If an organisation is registered at more than one location, with a separate speciality, or with more than one SMD vendor, they will be listed more than once.
  • If the addressee is linked to an SMD vendor, the vendor is listed in the Secure Messaging column and the addressee can be used for Secure Messaging.
Note: Communicare makes every effort to display the data returned from the directory services in the appropriate fields. However, we rely on the directory services to provide the data in a consistent way, so results may not always be what you expect.
To select a provider or organisation and copy the details to your letter, referral or clinical item:
  • For an entry included in your local address book, double-click an entry to select it.
  • For an online entry, first save it to your local address book and then select it:
    1. For the required entry, click Save iconSave.
    2. In the Address Book Entry window, click Save.
    3. In the Address Book window, double-click the entry to select it.