By Nancy Gunn, Senior Advisor, EMR Lab, OntarioMD; Reza Talebi, Manager, Practice Enhancement, OntarioMD; Melissa Coulson, Director, Program Design and Implementation, Cancer Screening, Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario);
In follow up to the blog on Resuming Cancer Screening During COVID-19, we want to make sure it’s easy for you to identify higher-priority patients for cancer screening in your electronic medical record (EMR) systems. Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario) and OntarioMD have worked together to give you some EMR tips to help you start to screen your patients again for cancer.
Preventative Care Queries and Searches
- To review Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario) Screening Guidelines click here.
- Use your current Preventative Care Queries and Searches to pull up a list of active patients in need of cancer screening. Once you have your list, use the columns provided to sort the patient lists or if your EMR has the functionality, you can export your report to CSV format for sorting and filtering.
- For example, you could sort your breast cancer screening list by people who have never been screened.
- Don’t forget! Check your flagged patients (using reminders, ticklers, alerts) to see who is due for annual breast or cervical screening because these patients may not appear in your regular preventative screening searches.
For users of OntarioMD’s i4C Dashboard
- Use the Prevention Screening Dashboard, and the Colorectal, Cervical and Breast Cancer Screening tiles to identify patients.
- Click on Overdue Pie Slices to identify lists of patients who are due for cancer screening.
TELUS PS Suite
- Filter based on the new guidelines for prioritizing testing: Open Records> Patient> Search> Select your current Cancer Screening Searches> click on the appropriate column names.
- Or you can use the Preventative Care Summary Report to find patients: Open Records> Patient> Preventative Care Summary Report> Uncheck Include Rostered Patients Only> double click on the Preventative Care Screening you want to work with (e.g., Stool Occult Blood- Not Done).
- Once you have your patient list, you can click on the column names to filter based on the guidance provided for prioritizing testing.
- You can also export these reports to CSV and filter by multiple columns. To export, click on Reports> Utilities> save as tab delimited or save as CSV.
QHR Accuro
- In QHR Accuro click on Icon at bottom left hand corner > type the word Query into the search field> click on selection Query Builder to open> select your currently used Cancer Screening Alert Definitions (queries)> click on the appropriate column names to filter based on the guidance provided for prioritizing testing.
- To export reports after running queries, click the Export button at the bottom of the Results window.
OSCAR EMR
- Go to Report> #13 Ontario Prevention Report> select Patient Set according to cancer screening> select the Prevention Query to match> Submit Query> click on the appropriate column names to filter based on the new guidelines for prioritizing testing. NOTE: These steps will give you the report for rostered patients only. To get a report for all active patients you must create a new Patient Set.
- The Ontario Prevention Report is not exportable. However, you can export search results generated through Report By Template searches.
If you want help developing preventative care tools and searches, feel free to contact your vendor or OntarioMD i4C Advisory Service at support@ontariomd.com.