Pharmacy users approach current visit patient profile retrieval with a different workflow

and perspective than users of CPRS and BCMA. A key distinction is that a pharmacy

user usually services a larger population of patients at any one time.

OpenVista Meds^®, MSC’s GUI pharmacy application, has a proposed design for patient

selection that allows the user to enter partial criteria and get a list of patients that meet the

criteria. Following is a mock-up prototype:

If more than one patient meets the search criteria, a list like the following would be generated.

The user selects a patient from the list and the list persists until cleared or refreshed.

  One of the proposed search criteria, “Days since discharge” is intended to allow the user

to easily retrieve a patient who was recently discharged. Otherwise, discharged patients

are excluded from the search. Pre-admits are another matter.

With regard to retrieving the recently discharged patients, what is the use case for this

capability? One scenario that comes to mind: the patient was discharged in the system

before they actually left and the nurse wants to give a dose of a med “for the road”.  Another

case is where the profile needs to be accessed for billing purposes after discharge. Are

these valid scenarios? Are there others?

Assuming that retrieval of discharged patients is useful, what happens when location criteria

are entered? Should I be able to enter ICU in the Unit with discharge days set to 1 day to get

a list of current and recently discharged ICU patients? If so, and if that is useful, does VistA

support such a query? If it doesn't, that is, if logically a patient cannot have a location and a

discharge date, what should happen?

  Answers,questions, comments appreciated.