Order Management

Oncologists are able to manage complex orders set for patients treated in outpatient chemotherapy clinics and in inpatient settings. Powerful decision support features help clinicians to ensure a safe computerized physician order entry. Capabilities include:

• Client-defined protocols
• Chemotherapy ordering, including cumulative and lifetime dose limits and dose range checking
• Embedded rules, alerts and warnings supported with the most extensive drug database in healthcare

Clinical Flowsheets

Oncologists can utilize a patient-centric flowsheet to format treatment cycle dates and other vital information, including:

• Vital signs
• Laboratory work (both internal and external results)
• Chemotherapy and radiation treatments and modifications
• Premedications
• Transfusions
• Hydration
• Ancillary medications
• Progress notes/reports

Clinical Staging

The HemOncPro product provides clinicians with access to on-line tools provided by the American Joint Commission on Cancer (AJCC). HemOncProEHR enables an oncologist to select a disease-specific protocol and modify it to create a patient-specific treatment plan that spans multiple visits and locations. Care providers can view and track the status of orders, reports, clinical results and drug interactions.

Staging Forms are included in the system to document tumors, the extent of spread to lymph nodes, and any metastasis. Knowing the state of the disease helps the clinician plan a treatment and determine a prognosis. Staging provides a common language that clinicians can use to communicate a patient's case. Knowing the stage is important to identifying clinical trials that may be suitable for a particular patient.

Interfaces for Communication with Hospital Information Systems

A suite of Health Level 7 (HL7) interfaces is available in the product for communicating with a wide range of other vendors' hospital and physician based systems to ensure coordinated care delivery.
The interfaces can include connectivity to:

• Demographic Information and Quality Management
• Nursing Systems
• Patient Care and Patient Safety
• Internal and external Laboratory and Microbiology
• Anatomical Pathology
• Blood Bank
• Pharmacy
• Imaging and Therapeutic Services
• Medical Records
• Physician Practice Management

Any piece of information that is required for a complete patient record can be placed in the Electronic Health Record: complaint, histories, physical, review of systems, plan, vitals, prescription, etc. In addition to documenting a patient's encounter, HemOncProEHR has the ability to run reports identifying complete but un-reviewed labs; allows the physician to consult schedules to check expected patient loads, and many other features described below. The key to entering all of this information into a patient's record in a timely manner is the use of pre-built specialty templates.

Vital Signs

All vital signs (weight, pulse, height, blood pressure, etc.) are displayed as a line graph relative to dates of previous encounters. This makes it easy to identify unhealthy trends or patterns in vital sign data. Vital Sign Monitor can be interfaced into the system.

Injection Management

HemOncProEHR provides a means for specifying injection dosages, units, location, lot numbers, and more; as well as the ability to run reports and print other information related to these injections.

Writing Prescriptions

The HemOncProEHR application has the ability to check past and current medications, drug allergies, etc. The physician in just a few point and clicks can prescribe the medication, dosage, frequency, number of refills and instructions, and print it out for the patient.

Advantages to Writing Prescriptions in HemOncProEHR:

• Ability to set default dosages, frequencies, refills, etc. for medications
• Ability to bring an old prescription forward into the current encounter, whether modified or just re-prescribed, much faster than by traditional paper methods
• Ability for physicians to securely transmit electronic prescriptions to pharmacies
• Ability for physicians to fax prescription information to pharmacies in conjunction with commercially available products that can be purchased separately

Clinical Documentation Reuse

The information required in the HemOncProEHR application is stored in the system in chronological order. The clinician can quickly navigate to previous categories of information within the medical record. In cases where patients have chronic ailments, conditions that do not change much with respect to time, the physician can quickly pull portions of previous medical records forward into the current patient encounter and speed the process of documenting the medical record.

Evaluation and Management (E&M)

Periodically, the government performs audits where they check charges for "E&M" services rendered and compare those charges to the supporting medical record documentation to insure compliance with these regulations. By using templates and reusing portions of the past medical records, the physician can quickly build the necessary documentation to justify his services. Also, since much of the information needed to estimate the level of care is available in an electronic format and many of the guidelines can be "automated," HemOncPro can offer the feature of estimating the level of care and provide documentation recommendations for moving to a higher level of care.

Medical Necessity Management and Coding

HemOncPro has a built-in coding system. As health insurers revise policies and the coding changes, the physician's practice has the ability to make those changes in the HemOncPro system. When the physician, nurse, or other employee orders a procedure or service, the software can provide hints as to what diagnoses is considered necessary for a given procedure, patient and insurer. And equally, by selecting a diagnosis, HemOncPro will hint at what procedure or service a health insurer considers medically necessary. This is made possible because the HemOncPro suite is fully integrated on a single data base for the Electronic Health Record, the Laboratory Information System and the Practice Management module.

Messaging

HemOncProPM provides a messaging system, which works in unison with the HemOncProEHR. Users of HemOncPro are able to send electronic messages back and forth to each other regarding patients. All correspondence can be saved as a part of the patient's permanent medical record.