Table of Contents
Care Pathways
Care Pathways are primarily used to determine the steps displayed to a clinician during a consultation. However they can also be used to influence how appointments, online bookings and health assessment questionnaires behave.
Sections of this page
Care Pathways and Consultations
Inca Clinic allows you to configure the steps to be carried out during a consultation; it does this through Care Pathways. The image below shows you how a vaccine consultation might look. Each of the six steps of this particular Care Pathway manages a particular aspect of the patient consultation. In the image, the current step is the Vaccine Scheduler; the previous steps are Travel Itinerary, Medical History and Vaccine History, and the following steps are Prescriptions and Laboratory Orders.
Inca clinic comes with a default set of Care Pathways configured for you; but you can create new ones or modify the existing ones to suit your own preferences.
How to Manage Your Care Pathways
If you're a Medical Director or System Administrator, you can modify existing Care Pathways and create new ones. Click on the Inca Administration tab; and then in the Consultation Settings panel, click Care Pathways. Choose the Care Pathway you wish to edit or click New to create a new Care Pathway.
Editing a Care Pathway
You can watch this video to learn how to edit a Cate Pathway:
The picture below shows you the Care Pathway management screen, on which there are three sections:
- The top section allows you to edit the name, description and other aspect of the Care Pathway.
- The middle section, Steps, displays the current steps in the Care Pathway.
- The bottom section displays the full list of available steps.
Detailed Instructions
Moving a Step: move your mouse over the step you want to move in the Steps section. Hold down the left mouse button and, while holding it down, move the step to its new location and release the left mouse button. (A little blue box will appear to help guide you with the placement of the step.) Then press Save.
Removing a Step: move your mouse over the step you want to remove. An 'X' will appear in the box; click it and confirm that you wish to remove the step. Then press Save.
Adding a Step: move your mouse over the step in the Step Inventory you want to add. Hold down the left mouse button and, while holding it down, move the step to a location of your choice in the Steps section, and release the left mouse button. (A little blue box will appear to help guide you with the placement of the step.) Then press Save. Note that you can repeat a step in a Care Pathway if you wish.
Setting the Health Assessment Questionnaire
You can associate a Health Assessment Questionnaire with a Care Pathway. Once this is done, that questionnaire will available to the user during the Medical History step of the Care Pathway. To set up the association: click Edit and under the “Control what happens with Consultations” section use the lookup icon to search for the Health Assessment Questionnaire you want to use. 1).
If a Care Pathway is not explicitly associated with a Health Assessment Questionnaire, then the default one will be used. This default is set via the value of InConsultationQuestionnaire in Inca Preferences. If this value is also blank then no questionnaire is loaded for Care Pathways without an explicitly associated questionnaire.
Additional Options
Follow-on Care Pathway: Inca Clinic allows you to prompt the user to choose another Care Pathway after the current one has been completed. For example, if the doctors in your clinic schedule the vaccines for a patient and then a nurse administers them, you can link the doctor's Care Pathway (one that uses the Vaccine Scheduling step) to the nurse's Care Pathway (containing the Vaccine Administration step). This means that when the first Care Pathway is completed, it's easy to start the follon-on one: on the Consultation Summary page the 'Next Step' will be automatically set to start the next Care Pathway. The waiting room will also be updated as appropriate.
Default Consultation Fee: You can link Care Pathways with a specific Consultation Fee: when the Care Pathway is used the Consultation Fee is added to the Invoice automatically. The fee can be removed from the Invoice if need be.
Care Pathway Steps
Inca Clinic supports the following Care Pathway steps:
Care Pathways Appointments and Online Bookings
The 'Control what happens with Appointments' section handles certain aspects of Appointment Management and Online Bookings. If you have enabled Online Bookings then you can email the patient a link that allows them to enter their contact details and complete a Health Assessment Questionnaire prior to their visit. You don't have to make your calendar times public to use this feature.
The Health Assessment Questionnaire and Email Template used is displayed on the Appointment details dialog. See Appointment Dialog
Online Assessment
This sets the Health Assessment Questionnaire a patient uses when completing a pre-visit confirmation. If the user books the appointment and chooses a Care Pathway then this questionnaire will be used. NOTE: You must also have an Email Template set which contains the Public Link field.
If an Email Template is set but no Online Assessment is selected then the default one is used (this is the Health Assessment Questionnaire set in the Inca Preference “AppointmentOnlineAssessment”).
If the patient books the time slot himself/herself then the Health Assessment Questionnaire set in the Inca Prefrences AppointmentOnlineAssessment Custom Setting is used.
Colour coding Appointments
If you use the Appointments Module you can assign a different colour to each type of Care Pathway, so you can see at a glance what Care Pathway each appointment is likely to require.
To set a colour, use a Hex colour code or standard web color name. Examples can be found on color-hex.com and Wikipedia.com. All of the colours used need to contrast with white, as this is the colour used in the text of each appointment.
Confirmation Email
A confirmation email is sent to the patient when a he/she books an appointment, and you can set up the template for this email. This allows you to word the email appropriately, to customise it for your clinic. See the help page Create and Managing Templates to learn about creating email templates, or contact us (sales@incaplex.com) and ask about our consultancy services. The option 'Do not send email' prevents an email from being sent.
Here's an example. Note that the {!IncaClinic__Patient_Appointment__c.IncaClinic__Public_Link__c} merge field will contain the unique link required by the patient. You can include any other text and information you like.
Online Steps (BETA)
You can determine which steps are displayed to the user when they complete the per-visit confirmation. This feature is in BETA at the moment, so the only step that you can hide is the Travel Itinerary step. In addition, you can't change the order of the steps. Your feedback is welcome.
