Saturday, January 10, 2009
NextGen - Abstracting historical medications
I have a question for NextGen users involving the ability to abstract historical medications. It is my understanding that the current module does not allow you to set any prior dates other than the current encounter date. This would of course preclude you from entering a historical start date for a medication regardless of it being current or not. If the medication was prescribed elsewhere then it seems to allow it otherwise it would appear that you have to enter either the same start and stop date or a current date and no stop date (if the med is currently taken). This of course seems to bring up many issues about how to enter historical meds if you can't actually enter an accurate date. Has anyone run into this issue and if so how did you work around it? Thanks
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4 comments:
There’s a hot fix for 5.5.26 that allows users to enter a start date for a medication prior to the encounter date. You have to make sure the “Prescribed elsewhere” check box is checked too. You may have to contact NG tech support to get the hot fix.
We ask our members to download and use this if important to keep the date or just leave it blank (which means = to current encounter date) if it is not important.
Thank you. I think the bigger problem for us are medications that were actually prescribed at the clinic. We don't want to say they were prescribed elsewhere in order to work around the NextGen issue, but at the same time wish to put it in accurately in terms of the start date which seems to be the dilemma even with the hot fix if I'm understanding you correctly.
If you switch back to the older med module, you can create a Custom encounter for abstraction.
File--New--Custom Encounter. Backdate that encounter to the date you opened. Or pick an arbitrary date like "1/1/1950", Then use that encounter to add abstracted meds and other info. You can use any start date you want.
Might help. Good luck.
P.S. The new med module seems stricter about this but it may just be a setting.
Charles - Nextgen - SCHC
Thanks everyone. I've spoken to NextGen about this in detail and the bottom line is yes you can create custom encounters but you would have to do it for every medication for every patient that you wanted to add. This would be far too time consuming so lets just hope this is fixed in the next version.
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