By: Dan Janowak, Consultant, Epic Practice
The beginning of the story
An email notification appears and it is a Director noting, "I can't tell what happened with this account. Can you tell me why this account is in ‘HB Acct WQ (Work Queue) 347?’ And, I'm seeing a lot of system action activity in Account History."
The investigation and troubleshooting
You check Account Maintenance and have gotten no further than the director who has proven time and again to be on top of her game. You know about Record Viewer and have the security as a build team member to use it. You check the Hospital Account (HAR) and scan through the very “techie” bits of data until you come across the WQ activity.
You determine that a user manually placed the account into the WQ, which means it will stay there forever, or until the account moves to a closed status; whichever comes first. Going further, you find the system action information stored on the HAR , and combined with the Audit Trail in Account Maintenance, you figure out someone has been working an account over the past two weeks. The user apparently had conflicting information as noted in the Account Notes, so the account kept bouncing between system auto actions because of the related changes to account information.
The pot of gold
The “smoking gun” can be found in many places, but Record Viewer is nearly a one-stop-shop for the investigation of individual cases. That’s because it has the ability to click on Hyperlinks to jump to the next linked record to follow the trail to the smoking gun. The savvy consultant can find definitive answers with the combination of Record Viewer (a direct view into the database) and a report tool like Account Query, Census reports of Department Appointment Reports (DARs), or reporting workbench reports. Record Viewer shows most, but not all data Epic has stored regarding the records. And it isn’t the only Epic technology that can do what it does (Some of us may recall using EAVIEWID way back in the early Epic day).
After the above investigation (which could take as little as five minutes with the right tools), you forward your answer back to your director to give them that little pot of gold you found, generating confidence and added good will. The end user was doing good work, but the timing and nature of the information caused some turbulence.
The Closing
If you don’t follow all of the above, that’s ok. It is written to quickly skip over an enormous topic, while still giving enough hints for the investigators/build teams to add to their tool kit. And, it’s enough hints for others to know what questions to ask if they are looking for a person who can find the smoking gun.
In essence, you need four things:
1) A tool like Record Viewer or EAVIEWID to be able to view all details of a single record, or just the important pieces all in one place/screen.
2) A tool to move from record to record to follow the bread crumbs. Record Viewer does this easily, and EAVIEWID can do slowly and without a quick ability to go backwards in the bread crumb trail.
3) A tool like Account Query, Chronicles, Reporting Workbench, Clarity, or certain standard application reports to be able to generalize the findings from single cases to all similar cases in the system.
4) The ability to recognize who has the skills to do 1 through 3 for you or your organization.
This is meant to be a short and quick point, and yes there are additional methods and tools available, some of which are more powerful than all of the above combined - which is to say, if you don’t find your pot of gold here, then it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
