A flag system is used on patient requests to denote the level of urgency and repriotise the order of requests in the list.
Flags are manually added from the request screen, or automatically via forms and recorded blood pressure results. Their colours and order of priority are as follows:
When the request appears in the list, a coloured bar on the left indicates the flag given. The system reorders the requests in order of urgency as shown below:
Automated Flags
Flags can be automatically applied to requests based on responses to forms, or blood pressure values which have been recorded.
Note: Where a request has already been flagged (either automatically or manually), if a subsequent form, or recorded blood pressure result triggers a higher priority flag, then it will be automatically applied to the request and will overwrite the existing flag.
For example, a clinician may have manually flagged a request as 'Urgent' based on the content of the request and then later a blood pressure result is recorded, which automatically triggers the 'Emergency' flag and the request is automatically reprioritised.
Forms:
Forms can be designed to have flags associated with the responses given, or values entered by patients. Such as the selection a patient has made below, which has been configured to trigger the 'Emergency' flag automatically. The patient selects it on the form they complete:
And their request now appears at the top of the request list with the appropriate flag applied:
Blood Pressure values:
Blood Pressure ranges can be configured to automatically assign flags to requests, based on the blood pressure result recorded by either a staff user or the patient (Please click here for more details)
Flags on Shared and Transferred requests
Practices working within a network can share or transfer requests onwards to other organisations with whom they are networked. Where this occurs, any flags already applied to requests will also be shared with the other provider initially. They can however change the priority flag from their side to repriotise it within their list, but this does not update or impact on the flag applied to the same request at your side.
Auto-Complete
Where a custom action has been configured to 'Auto-complete', this will only be possible if the request generated does not automatically trigger one of the following higher priority flags:
Requests which trigger any of the above flags will not automatically complete and will instead appear in the request list with the associated flag applied.
If a custom action button is configured to Auto-complete and has the default 'Routine' flag applied , or has triggered a 'Lower' priority flag, then it will automatically complete when the patient submits their request with no further action needed and will writeback to the clinical record if this is enabled.