Overview

The Health Maintenance block can be used to see at a glance if a patient is up-to-date on certain things that you want to track. It can show, for example, when they last had a mammogram, bone density scan, or other preventative test. We can load in a basic set up US Preventive Task Force health maintenance trackers to get you started, and you can easily add your own rules.


Health Maintenance rules can apply to patients based on their age, sex, and whether they have one of the specified diagnosis codes in their chart (PMH or Assessment). If the rule applies to a patient based on the set parameters, the name of the rule will appear in that Patient's Health Maintenance block, with a space to enter the date that item was last done. If the patient is overdue or has never had a date recorded for that item, it will be shown in red.


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Details

Add a New Health Maintenance Tracker

Add or edit a health maintenance tracker by clicking on the pencil icon in the upper right-hand corner of any patient's Health Maintenance block OR by clicking on Admin > Manage > Health Maintenance.


Name - Give the tracker a short but descriptive name as you would like it to display in patients' Health Maintenance blocks and on health maintenance reports.


Age, sex, dx codes - You may use the fields provided to restrict which patient charts the tracker appears on by sex, age, or specific diagnostic code(s)/ Leave defaults in place to have the tracker appear on all patient charts.


Frequency - Specify the recommended interval between instances of the test/evaluation/other criteria. If it is something you want to be able to record in the Health Maintenance block, but never want to be shown as overdue, you can specify 999 years as the interval.


Applies to - If you opened the management pop up from a patient chart, you can set whether the tracker should apply to all matching patients or only to that specific patient. Generally, you would select All matching patients.


Override - In some cases, there is a secondary rule that should override the primary health maintenance rule. For example, women with certain risk factors (triggered by dx codes) might want more frequent mammograms that the population at large. If this is the case for criteria that you track, you can set a rule to override an existing rule. The result will be that where both rules apply, the overriding rule will appear in place of the overridden rule.


Description - Add a description, if any, that you want to appear when you hover over that rule in the Health Maintenance block.


Using Health Maintenance Trackers

To record an instance of a particular tracker for a patient, click on the tracker name in the patient's Health Maintenance block. Then, in the space provided, enter the date they completed the item. It will auto populate today's date. Then click "Save".

 

You will be able to see at a glance when a patient last had these items done (if no date has been entered, it will show "Never"). If anything is "out of date," according to the rules that you have set, it will show up in red.
 

Example(s)

Advanced Uses

In some cases, you might want to use the Health Maintenance block for some non-traditional trackers that you want to be able to run date-based reporting on. 


For example: you sell a specific package to patients that is good for a period of time, and you want to follow up with them about renewal at the end of the period. You can use a Health Maintenance rule to track this:

  1. Create a dummy diagnosis code (to apply when the patient purchases the package) under Admin > Manage > Diagnosis Codes. Give your custom diagnosis a name, an "ICD10 code" (this is important - it is how you will connect the diagnosis up to the Health Maintenance Tracker, and select "non-ICD" as the type of code.
  2. Create a Health Maintenance rule that is triggered by that dummy diagnosis.
  3. Add the dummy diagnosis to the patient's PMH block when they purchase the package. Then click on the corresponding tracker in the Health Maintenance block to add the purchase date.

To remove the Health Maintenance rule (if they had a lapsed package and opted not to purchase again), you could remove diagnosis code from their PMH so that the rule no longer applied to them.


mammogram, colonoscopy, health tracking, exam