The recent Connect Care launch involves much more than a health record. Aging laboratory, diagnostic imaging, pharmacy, registration and other systems are replaced by an integrated clinical information system (CIS).
Although the Connect Care wave 1 sites have a limited footprint, changes to support systems have far wider impact. Of greatest concern has been report of possible missing results and reports in eDelivery streams to non-Connect Care electronic medical records (EMRs).
After thorough and careful investigation, it is certain that laboratory instruments are correctly interfaced to Connect Care laboratory information systems. The right results are received without error and are correctly filed to external systems like Netcare.
However, some results and reports are delayed on their journey to the EMRs of ordering prescribers. Why?
The primary reason is uncertainty about exactly where to route the results. Legacy approaches to results routing involved many different laboratory information systems, with different physician directories. Connect Care brings a consistent and reliable prescriber registry to ensure precise results routing. Every provider has a unique identifier. This is combined with identifiers for the setting and department from where orders were initiated and results need to be returned.
Unfortunately, there are many test requisitions that still lack the correct identifiers. This forces a manual process for identifying the provider, location and EMR for routing. Critical and important results are communicated directly to avoid delay. Processes are firming up for increasing the number of old requisitions that can be routed manually without delay.
What can physicians do? The single most important corrective is to ensure that the new provincial provider, department and submitter IDs are used on all requisitions, that recurring requisitions are pulled and corrected with new ones, and that EMR vendor updates to incorporate definitive ordering identifiers have been applied.