Soarian Form Builder
By Rich Mach

Perhaps the statement you’ll hear the most as you begin to consider the installation of the Soarian^® suite of clinical products is to “do your upfront analysis and design.” In other words, don’t build until you’re sure you have all your ducks in a row.

The individual build tool sets are so interdependent that getting things right in one area can save you countless hours of additional work down the line when working on another portion of the build. This is especially true as you start to build your assessment or order forms. Make sure that you include all the project stake holders in the design and get their feedback from the start.

Using order forms as an example, consider this as you start your build.

• How are my Types (Departments) and Sub Types (Sub-Departments) going to be organized?

All forms are displayed based on their applicability criteria. This criterion includes the Patient Type, Type (department), Sub Type (sub-department), Service, Entity, Patient Gender, Patient Age Start and Patient Age End. In most cases an order form uses a combination of the Type, Sub-Type, and Service.

Now, consider how some of your orders are placed. For example, you most likely have a department of Lab in your current system. It has several sub-departments, but one that is a “general” sub-department. You could set up a Type of Lab and a Sub Type of General Lab and this would work. But let’s explore a little deeper. You may have hospital protocols in place that dictate who and when should collect a specimen based on the order placed. So, in this general lab list of services you may have services that are only nurse collect specimens, while others may be collected by any number of other clinical sources as well as by the nurse and some that may only be a lab collected specimen.

In the example above if you wanted a form for only nurse collect services you could build an Applicability with a Type of Lab, a Sub Type of General Lab and then select, using check boxes, from the list of all services listed in the Sub Type of General Lab those items that should only be nurse collect. Since there could be a significant number of services to choose from, and since the applicability criteria can be corrupted by some form changes, this may not be the best alternative.

A better idea might be to use Sub Types and organize your services not only by the ancillary department, but also how they are ordered. In this example, when creating the Sub Types for Lab, you would create a Sub Type of General Lab, General Lab NC, and General Lab LC. Then you would load those services that should only be ordered as nurse collect in the General Lab NC Sub Type and the lab collect only items in General Lab LC Sub Type. All other general lab tests would be loaded in the General Lab Sub Type. This would allow for different forms to be used based on who is to collect the specimen. The applicability for each form would reside at the Sub Type level and maintenance would be much easier in the long run.

This same thought process should be used any time you have a group of services that contain specific data or need a specific ordering process to take place. In some instances the number of services involved may be so small that it really is not necessary to add a Sub Type, but any time the number of services is significant, you should consider whether this would be a good time to use a separate Sub Type.

All of the Type and Sub Types should be created prior to loading your services into your service catalog and is one illustration of why it is so important to plan ahead when implementing Soarian Clinicals.

We have Soarian expertise to help guide your implementation or to transfer knowledge. Look for additional tips and tricks at www.getvitalizsed.com. For more information, please contact VCS at 610.444.1233 or vcs@getvitalized.com.