This resource has been created to provide guidance for trainees who are new to using Connect Care. 

Configure Outpatient 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 trainee 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.

Admitted Patients

As a trainee 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.

Add a Supervising Physician

The most helpful way to populate My Patients is to add the patients of your supervising physician(s). To do this: 

• Right click on the title My Patients and select Edit Criteria 

• The top of the window that appears is titled Add Providers 

• Make sure there is a checkbox next to Admitting, Attending, and Treatment Team 

• In the provider search field enter the name of your supervising physician. 

• Click Accept 

• The list will update to show the seven patients associated with that physician  

Add Provider Team

• Using Available Lists, bottom left corner, find the name of your facility

• The facilities are organized by community and then the name of the facility

• After clicking on the facility name scroll through the list of subfolders to find Provider Teams 

• Each hospital has a unique list of provider teams, scroll down to the team you are working with 

• Right click select Send To → My Patients

Add by Unit 🛏️

• Go back to the top level for your facility

• Click on the folder titled Units

• Scroll down to find the unit that your patients are admitted to, 

• Right click, select Send To → My Patients

Configure the Consult list

• go back to EMD WMC University of Alberta Hospital

• scroll down to New Consults - Physician

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

• 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 Trainees (residents and fellows) to see the schedule of surgical cases.

Snapboard provides a view of the scheduled cases in the ORs are your facility. To access snapboard for OR procedures you first have to login to the appropriate zone department i.e., Edmonton Zone Gen Surg, Calgary Zone Surgery, etc.

SnapBoard

Snapboard does not appear by default, to access is

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

• • find the Reports menu

  • Hover over SnapBoard

  • notice the pushpin icon that appears, click the pushpin

  • select "add to toolbar" to have snapboard appear at the top of the hyperspace window.

Run Snapboard

When you first launch snapboard you have to identify what facility you want to run it for. 

• When you are logged in to a Surgery Department each facility in your zone will be listed

• Select the appropriate facility name

• Click the Run button (lower right corner)

the 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 trainee 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).

Notes 🗒️

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

• One activity where co-signs are required relates to discharge documentation.

• Discharge, transfer, deceased, operative and consult reports are Connect Care summative documentation types that also flow to Netcare. Without a co-sign, the summative document will post to Netcare under the trainee's name (as opposed to the attending prescriber), which in turn provides an inaccurate reflection of the record of care and can impact follow-up efforts.

• When authoring a note that requires a co-sign check off the co-sign box, enter the name of the supervisor who will be cosigning your note.

• That person will receive a message to their InBasket that links to the note so it can be reviewed and signed.

Note Templates

The following note templates have been incorporated in to Connect Care to provide standardized documentation by typing the "dot phrase" shown: 

• Progress note ".ahsipheadingsProgress"

• H&P Admission note  ".ahsipbasicAdmit "

• Consult note  ".ahsipbasicConsult "

• Discharge Summary  ".ahsipbasicDCSummary "

Orders

As a trainee you have the authority to sign orders, but you may be asked to have your orders reviewed before signing, or have them signed by others. This may be true when starting to work in a new area as part of an elective or off-service rotation and/or for complex sets of orders such as for an admission.

• 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 c

PERSONALIZATION

Customizing Patient Lists  

The default patient list columns are okay, but there is information missing, such as name of the Attending physician, what provider team a patient is associated with, etc.  The following steps allow you to quickly update all the columns 

• Select My Patients in the Patient Lists tab with a single Click 

• Select Edits Lists –> Properties from the area above 

• Notice the top half of this screen shows Available columns and the bottom half shows Selected Columns. 

• On the right side of the window, half way down is a button labelled Copy 

• Click that button 

• The window that appears is a list of templates that you can apply 

• The one you want is MD Ward Consults 

• Click the down arrow 10 times or slowly scroll down to find it 

• Select "IP MD Ward Consults" 

• Click Accept at the bottom right to finalize and see your changes 

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 MD Ward Consults”

• 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 customize 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.

Personalizing Your Documentation 

Personalizing documentation is extremely valuable for residents and fellows as it not only speeds up your documentation but helps to ensure consistent documentation that aligns with the expectations of the service that you are working with. 

In this next section you will learn how to create your own documentation templates, then how to share them with your colleagues, and finally how to find templates that have been created by others, for example the attending physician that you are working with on a new clinical rotation. 

Create a Progress Note Template  

Start by going to the chart of your admitted patient.  

• Create a new note 

• Select type as Progress Note 

• In the blank note type some headers 

• Assessment 

• Plan 

• Subjective 

• Objective 

• Select the text you have entered using Ctrl + A  

• Click the green + at the top of the note to open the SmartPhrase editor 

• Click Continue as you want to use the highlighted words to create your phrase. 

• Name this note template 

• We highly suggest prefacing the name of your template with the 3 letters of your initials 

• For example, RESProg 

• Enter a short description  

• Make changes to the text of the note on the left side of the 

• When finished, Click Accept.  

How to use this new SmartPhrase 

• In your note type “.” Followed by the three initials you used. 

• This will conjure up the list of matching smartphrases.   

Editing Your SmartPhrase 

To edit your existing SmartPhrase.  

• Click on My Tools (which appears at the top of hyperspace) and  

• select My SmartPhrases. 

• The My Phrases window will open, and you can manage your SmartPhrases from this window 

• Find the smartphrase you want to edit,  

• Left-Click to highlight it then Edit 

• Make any changes to the text or SmartLinks as required. 

• Click Accept. 

To copy a colleague’s SmartPhrases 

In Connect Care all SmartPhrases created by providers are accessible to everyone. This provides a mechanism for all providers in a clinical service to follow agreed upon documentation standards.  

• From My Phrases, enter the user you wish to copy from in the User: field.  

• Select the desired smartphrase from the list

• Double click to open the smartphrase

• review it to see if it is one that would be useful to you

• Copy the smartphrase

  1. Bottom right corner find the copy button and click it

  2. name the smartphrase, starting with your initials

  3. make any changes to the smartphrase, such as removing names or locations the original creator had included

  4. Save your changes.