General Quick Start Guide

This resource has been created to provide guidance for Medical Learners (including Physician Assistant Students, NP Students, and Clinical Clerks) who are new to using Connect Care. 

Log In Department

Leaners login to the virtual department for the zone. Each department is configured to ensure that the user the appropriate functionality is available, surgery users have additional functions that a pediatrics user would not need.

The department you select will be named Zone + Specialty, e.g.,

• EDMONTON ZONE NEUROLOGY or

• CALGARY ZONE PEDIATRICS.

Exceptions to the Zone + Specialty department name include:

Emergency Medicine when you are working in an emergency department, since patients are coming to that ED room you need to login to that specific ED you are working at, for example:

• CGY ACH Emergency

• CGY PLC Emergency

• EDM UAH WMC Emergency

• EDM RAH ATC Emergency

Labour & Delivery is another example of logging in to the hospital department rather than zone department, for example:

• CGY PLC L&D

• EDM RAH LH L&D

Schedule 🗓️

The Schedule activity is where you find the Schedule for Outpatient (Ambulatory) clinics

• Schedule shows the patients that are scheduled to be seen today by you. But as a medical student patients are, typically, not scheduled to be seen by you they are scheduled to a physician.

The steps below can be used to see the schedule for the physician(s) you are working with.

• from the schedule activity click on your name, where it appears in the top left corner

• click the pushpin to pin this view

• click the ➕ create button

• name the new schedule view

• click configuration tab

• click Provider radio button

• enter the name of the physician you are working with

• click Accept

The schedule for that physican will now appear and be available for you to select each time you login.

Finding Patients - Admitted Patients 🔎

As a Medical Learner you will be, primarily, interacting with patients that are admitted to the hospital or scheduled for an outpatient office visit.

• DO NOT USE Patient Lookup to find patients who is scheduled for an outpatient visit or is admitted to the hospital, this includes  patients in the Emerg.

• There are examples of when you would use patient lookup to search for a person who is no longer admitted to the hospital. That is functionality that you will learn as you have spent more time in connect care.

Patient Lists 🧍

There are a different ways to find a patient, or patients.

Find a patient

The first is to use the search field in the top right corner, make sure it is set to search the hospital you are working at, use the little 🔽 to change the name of the hospital you are searching at e.g., EDM WMC University Hospital

• You can search by name, ULI or MRN

Finding patients

The second way to find a patient is to use Available Lists to find groups of patients on a Unit or who are part of a Provider Team.

• You find a list by going to the hospital you are working at and looking in the Units folder or the Provider Team folder to find the appropriate list.

• These lists can then be added to your existing My Patients list.

Find by Unit 🛏️

1. Find EDM WMC University of Alberta Hospital

2. Click Units

3. Scroll down to find EDM UAH WMC 3C3

4. Right click, select Send To → My Patients

Find by Provider Team

1. Go back to EDM WMC University of Alberta Hospital

2. Find Provider Teams folder

3. Scroll down to the team you are working with confirm your provider team name when you start

4. Right click select Send To → My Patients

Find consult list

1. go back to EMD WMC University of Alberta Hospital

2. scroll down to New Consults - Physician

3. in that folder scroll down to find the service you are working on e.g., Internal Medicine

4. right click select Send To → My Consults

Finding Patients – Surgical Cases

Surgical cases will appear in the schedule for the OR where the case has been requested or booked. Status Board is the best way for Medical Learners to see the schedule of surgical cases.

Launch Status Board

To access Status Board you will:

• Click EPIC menu at the top left of the hyperspace window

  • find the Reports menu

  • Select StatusBoard

Save Favourite View

To configure Status Board to show a particular OR you will:

• Using the search function enter the name of your facility e.g., FMC, PLC, RAH, etcetera.

• A list of available views will come up

• Click the Star next to the name of one of the views

• This will now be saved as a favourite and you can easily launch that view

Search Status Board

Using the search function you can enter the name of a surgeon or anesthetist that you are working with to see only cases that are associated with that person.

Chart 📁

Chart Review is all history for this patient that is in Connect Care, for real patients there should be a lot of information here

• Summary is just this admission

• The search tool in the storyboard will search the current admission (summary) and historic information (chart review)

Navigators 🧭

IMPORTANT

As a Medical Learner you will be interacting with navigators related to ADT, Admission, Discharge, Transfer

If you are involved in a patient going through one of these transitions you MUST use the appropriate navigator. It is not correct to simply write an admission order using the orders activity tab, that will NOT result in an appropriate/complete admission

For an admission the actions that are completed in the admission navigator are: update the Problem List, write the H&P note, complete the Admission Orders actions (which includes home medication reconciliation).

Other actions of the admission navigator may not need to be done e.g., Implants

Notes 🗒️

Medical Learners are supervised by fully licensed prescribers who must co-sign or attest to many activities in the Connect Care clinical information system (CIS).

• Notes that you author will require a co-signor

• This can be a resident or staff physician. 

Orders

As a Medical Learner you will not be able to sign orders, rather orders can be Saved (or Pended) for review and sign off by an M.D.. 

• Save work → Not Ready - orders are hidden from all other Connect Care users

• Save work → Ready - your orders can be seen by all other prescribers in connect care

Confirm with the team, who they want you to inform when you have orders that are ready, and HOW you want you to communicate that. 

PERSONALIZATION

Snapshot 📸

The snapshot report appears on the bottom half of the screen when you click on the name of a patient you can change the buttons that appear just below the patient name and to the right of the Binoculars icon.

To change these use the 🔧 that appears on the far right of this toolbar

Activity tabs in the patient chart

Open Charlie’s chart. You can change the default activity tabs that appear in the patients charge, change the order, add or remove tabs. Use the 🔧 that appears on the far right. It is handy to add Launch Netcare to your activity tabs, that allows you to access the netcare chart for the patient you have open in connect care

Patient Lists

• Customising patient lists such as moving, add, or remove columns. right click on My Patients and open Properties.

• Use the ⬆️ or ⬇️ in the lower right corner to change order of column

• Remove button will remove the highlighted column

Creating a new list

• Click Edit List 🔧 then → Create My List

• Give the list a name, such as “Followup List”

• Use the Copy button to apply a format for the columns

• Scroll down to “IP Medical Student My Patients Template”

• Add patients by dragging a patient over, or using the right click → send to…

• Add patient button can be used, click on the name of the list and then click Add Patient to find one patient to add to that list

Order Preferences 🌟

TERMINOLOGY- epic uses the term preferences when talking about orders. A preferred order can also be called a favourite you may see both terms when working with orders

• Personalization prefix - a good prefix should have at least 3 characters and be something you will never forget. We suggest people to use their initials as you will never forget  your initials.

• The green ➕New will take you to see your favourites  when you click the “Only Favourites” it displays the items that you have made a favourite.

• You can create a favourite order by clicking the ⭐ that appears in the name of the item in the shopping cart.

• Create Panel allows you to group 3 or more items together so that you can order multiple items in one preferred order

  • Options → Create Panel

  • Name your panel, using your prefix

Order Sets

• To customise an order set type the name of the orderset in the order panel e.g., “Gen Med Admit”

• ✏️ can be used to customise a particular item of the orderset

• Order sets personalised by others can be found by going to the 🔧Personalize in the red banner and selecting User Smartsets

Copying Favourite Orders from Another User

• Go to 🔧 Personalize

• Click Preference List Composer (your second choice)

• Click the Copy User Lists button that appears at the bottom of this screen

• Enter name of person you are copying from in the From User field

• Put a check mark next to the order group you want to copy i.e., Orders Outpatient or Orders Inpatient

• Click the ✔️Copy button to copy all those orders over to your favourite orders

• Click Close to go back to the first screen and show you that you now have have those orders in your favourites, double click on the Outpatient order line and it will show you the name and information of all the orders you copied

Notes

TERMINOLOGY - documentation templates that you create are called SmartPhrases but you may also hear them referred to as note template or dot phrases

You can create a smart phrase by typing out text, highlighting that text then click the ➕ just above where you typed and

• give it a name using your prefix

• add a simple description

• on the left side you create your SmartPhrase.

To add your SmartPhrases you go to a note, click on a blank line and type .YOURPREFIX

You can create a note template by 1) free typing the text of the template, 2)  using smart links e.g., .name, .age or .gender so that the note links to the chart

TERMINOLOGY - smart links are codes that pull information from the chart

You will see in this example that the smart link automagically grabbed information from the chart e.g., the patients name.