The release
notes below are dated. When you apply the update, you will receive all changes
since your last update. To find the last date you updated, login to Accuro and
click Help > About > Details.
Features
Accuro Branding
You may have heard that earlier this year, we have changed our name from Optimed Software to QHR Technologies Inc. In this release, Accuro will now have the new QHR Technologies Accuro logos and colors. You will see this right away when you open Accuro and in the login screen. The rest of Accuro does have some slight coloring differences: - The scheduler background has been lightened - The Background color for tasks and messages is now a light yellow.
Accuro Nova Scotia
QHR Technologies Inc. is pleased to announce that Accuro is now available to clinics in Nova Scotia. Accuro has been fully MSI accredited.
Accuro offers a full suite of tools enabling clinics to manage their patients easily and efficiently, these include EMR, scheduling, documents, electronic claims, labs, waitlist, Faxing, creating and assigning tasks, messaging and all the other features available in Accuro.
Accuro has 8 icons on the left hand side that give access to the following areas of the system:
Home: The Home area contains folders for Mail (internal to Accuro, not regular email), Tasks, Documents and Labs. When labs and documents are sent to a user they can be found in the inbox of the appropriate folder.
Scheduler: This is where you can set up clinic sessions and make appointments for patients and access the calendar (there are two calendars: Office Calendar and Provider Calendar).
Traffic: The Traffic Manager (if used) is where the flow of patients through the clinic can be managed. If a clinic has a lot of walk-in appointments, this feature is particularly useful.
Patients: This is the area of Accuro where patient information is stored. This information includes their demographics, relationships, providers and also any private billing.
Documents: is the area of Accuro where documents can be uploaded and attached to a patient’s medical record. Documents uploaded into this area can be sent to providers for review.
Claims: The claims area of Accuro is where the billing is done. In this area users can view daily claims, claims that have been created and not yet submitted, claims that have been paid, claims that have been refused (or adjusted), match claims to a patient and access accounts receivable.
EMR: This is the area of Accuro where the patient’s medical information is stored, Consultations, Medications, Histories, Allergies, Lifestyle, Immunizations and any other information you want recorded for a patient.
Waitlist: View information on patients on a waitlist, their priority, when they were added, the procedure required and status.
Many areas of Accuro can be customized; documents and forms can be created/edited to suit your clinical requirements ensuring that Accuro is a tool that fits your specific clinical needs.
Open Provider Permissions
Open provider permissions allows providers to choose individually whether their patient chart records should be available to other users (who have EMR access) without requiring an explicit permission to be setup on a per user basis. On a provider basis, access can be opened up to users within certain roles.
The open provider permissions do not affect any areas of Accuro that are used for administration purposes.
The aim of the open chart policy is to make it simpler for clients in large environments to reduce the overhead required for setting user and role permissions for each provider. Using open providers providers with enabled roles will give read only access to users in all offices (if they are assigned to the enabled roles). This allows users to view appointments, labs and EMR information for patients with other providers.
The information made available by the open providers feature is only visible in Encounter Notes (EMR > Encounter Notes tab) and the Appointment History window (F4)
Note: The open provider permissions work in conjunction with other permissions in Accuro i.e. if a user does not have EMR permissions, they cannot see any EMR information (even if a provider is set up as being an open provider).
Open Office permissions can be set up by clicking Users > select Manage Security > click Open Providers. For more specific information on this module refer to the User Guide (Help > Accuro User Guide).
History of Problems
An update has been made to the History of Problems medical history band in Encounter notes to make them easier to read. All problems are now in bold text, the notes are in regular text which is on the next line. A user preference has been added to enable the displaying of the notes to be turned off, if required. To access user preferences click File > select User Preferences click Display.
Chart Access, Data Sharing
The following changes have been made to enable better chart access for data sharing clinics:
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Multiple Data Share Registries can now be setup on an Accuro instance.
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The Data Sharing IDs of Clinics, Providers and Patients have been updated so that Accuro can link to many Data Share clinics (Accuro needs to know the registry that each ID is from in order to ensure accurate use).
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When a user loads a patient in their EMR, Accuro now check each EMR provider the user has access to see which registries they belong to. The user then only has access to the patient record in those registries.
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When a request is made to a clinic to view the patient record, only records for providers that are in the registry the request came from are provided.
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A filter option has been added to the Data Sharing patient search to limit patients’ results to only those with an Enrolled Provider.
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When a patient is enrolled the provider is now the primary for all registries that the patient is known to exist in.
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When a patient record close visit it done, all available patient registries are checked and if the patient doesn't exist in any of them, the list of registries is displayed with a message saying the patient doesn’t belong to any of them. The user can then add the patient to registries that they do not belong in the Close Visit window. If the patient is already in enrolled with a doctor in the current clinic, it is recorded in the registry that the patient is newly added to.
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Visit chart items sent to each registry are only those that belong to the providers that exist in the registry.
ECG File Link, Welch Allen Labs
Using the File Link add-on for CardioPerfect Workstation, tests and interpretations such as ECG or Spirometry Reports can be exported to PDF or Tiff in a folder with an XML file that contains patient information and details about the report (e.g. Interpretations).
Accuro will recognize Welch Allyn details, attempt to find the patient automatically or allow a quick add of the patient using the patient demographics supplied from CardioPerfect Workstation. Details such as the interpretation and key dates from the report will be automatically populated into the document description and related dates when available.
Fax Recipient, One-Time
An update has been allowed where users can now add a one-time recipient of the current fax that does not have to be saved to the address book. A button has been added next to the search in letter generation that when clicked allows users to enter the one-time fax number. To access generate letter select the EMR icon > click the Encounter Notes tab > right-click on an item and select Generate Letter.
Locking Forms
Forms can now be locked in the same way as encounter notes. This is available as a right-click menu option or can be set to lock after a specified number of hours. To manually lock a form select the EMR icon > click the Encounter Notes tab > right-click on a form and select Lock. To setup forms to lock after a specified amount of time click Users > select Manage Security > click System Settings > click the General tab > Lock Forms in the Encounter Notes section.
Maintenance and Issue Fixes
Allergies:
Deleting Custom Allergies
An update has been made to the allergies area of Accuro, a delete button is displayed in the Add/Remove list when a user selects a custom allergy. If a user selects to delete a custom allergy, a deletion confirmation message is displayed prior to the allergy being deleted. The delete button is a feature permission for users that can be enabled/disabled by administrators. To delete an allergy select the EMR icon > click the Encounter Notes tab > the Allergies section is located towards the bottom-right of the window. To access the feature permission to allow users to be able to delete allergies click Users > select Manage Security > click Feature Access > Select either the Role Permissions or the User Permissions tab.
Description in the Search Allergy Window
When a user was scrolling through the allergies using the arrow keys on the keyboard, the description was not refreshing to show the current allergy being viewed. An update has been made to ensure the description refreshed to match the allergies being scrolled. To access the Allergy Search window select the EMR icon > click the Encounter Notes tab > click the “+” to the right of the Allergies ribbon.
Billing:
Adjusting to Paid, No-Patient Bills
A client reported that a claim was showing as unpaid, when adjusting to paid, an error was occurring. An investigation found the error occurred because the bill was preventative care and had no patient associated with it. When a user tried to adjust to paid it was failing because there was no patient. An update has been made so that bills without patients can be adjusted to paid without any errors being generated. To adjust to paid select the Claims icon > select the appropriate tab > right-click on a bill and select options > click Adjust to Paid.
Batch Number (ON)
An update has been made so that when a batch number reaches 10,000 it is reset back to 0. This is because the batch number sent in submission files can only be four digits.
Billing Surcharge Amounts (BC)
The uninsured minimum and maximum values were being incorrectly used. An investigation found Accuro was using the insured values, not the uninsured values. An update has been made to ensure that the billing calculator correctly determines whether to use the insured values or the uninsured values when calculating the surcharge prices.
Claim Remarks (MB)
Following feedback from our QA department, the changes listed below have been made to the claim remarks area of a bill:
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The Accuro icon is now displayed in the window.
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The top of the Claim Remarks window now says “Tabs and new lines will be replaced with spaces when submitted to MB Health.”
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The title of the Remarks Macro Editing window has been changed to say “Manage Remarks Macro.”
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Remark macro editing has been updated to automatically capitalize the text (in the same way the main remarks editor does).
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The note that says do not use the Enter character has been removed. This is now handled at the point of submission, so users can now use the enter key.
To access claim remarks select the Claims icon > select the appropriate tab > double-click to open a claim > click the Edit Remarks button.
Daily Claims and Unsubmitted Claims Tabs (SK)
After an edit and save in either Daily Claims or Unsubmitted Claims the selected claim was not being reselected. An update has been made so that when a claim is changed and saved the claim is now selected in the claims table. To access daily or unsubmitted claims select the Claims icon > click the Daily Claims or Unsubmitted Claims tab, as required.
Description Field in Manage Procedures Window
When users entered a large amount of text in the description field of the Manage Procedures window and then attempted to save, an error occurred. This was caused by the text having more characters than could be saved to the database. An update has been made so users can only enter a maximum of 100 characters (after which they can no longer type in the field). To access the Manage Procedures window click Billing > select Options > click Manage Procedures.
Exceptions Report (MB)
An Exceptions report has been created. This report identifies claims that require attention because of either rejection or adjustment. The information is similar to what is displayed on the Not Reconciled tab (without any of the pending claim responses). This report can be grouped by either provider or by provider and by practitioner number. To access reports from anywhere in Accuro press Ctrl+R.
New Bill Menu Option
Following the recent update where users can now create a bill from anywhere in Accuro using Ctrl+B, another update has been made to enable users to create a bill from the Billing menu option from anywhere in Accuro too. Prior to this update they had to be in Claims to create a bill from the billing menu option. To create a bill click Billing > select New Bill.
Search for a Patient When Manual Matching (MB)
In some instances a claim response is received that does not have either a claim number or a PHN, this was preventing users form manually being able to match a response to any claim as potential matches were not being found automatically. For this reason a patient search field has been added to the Unmatched Remittances tab where users can select a patient and the selected patient’s claims are populated into the potential matches table. To access unmatched remittances select the Claims icon > click the Unmatched Remittances tab.
Documents:
Document Review History, Home Section
On the documents page, the "Download Faxes" and "Directory..." buttons are noticeably shorter than the others. The buttons should have the same height to maintain a proper look and feel.
Masking Scanned Documents
An update has been made so users can now mask scanned documents. To mask a document Alt+click the item being masked in the Virtual Chart, the Configure Mask window is displayed. To access the virtual chart select the EMR icon > click the Virtual Chart tab.
Previously Attached Attachments, eReferrals (MB)
An update has been made so that items previously attached to an eReferral are flagged to enable users to easily identify what has already been sent.
Encounter Notes:
Medical History Bands in Encounter Notes
When switching back and forth between the Encounter Notes tab and the Day Sheet tab the Medical History bands were being reloaded and the memory was not being released from previous version loaded. An update has been made to ensure that memory is released when users move to a different area of Accuro. To access the Encounter Notes tab or the Day Sheet tab select the EMR icon.
External Medications in Encounter Notes
Newly added external medications were being incorrectly being displayed bottom of the External Medications list (they were at the top of the list when first added, but on returning to the EMR, they were reordered to the bottom of the list). An update has been made to ensure that the newest external medications are displayed at the top of the list. To view external medications select the EMR > click the Encounter Notes tab > the External Medications ribbon is located on the right-hand side.
External Communication:
Outbound Clinical Notes Forms; ORM – Accuro to PROMIS (BC)
A new interface has been created to send outgoing ORM messages to PROMIS this includes associated ACE MLLP Sender functionality. Patient visit encounter notes are sent as PDF files on either the initial save or on an update.
Forms:
Form Editor Window
An update has been made to the form editor window so that users can access and edit other windows when this window is open. Previously this window would have to be closed before users could edit a different window in Accuro.
Labels:
Label Justification
A new checkbox “Center Label” has been added in the individual label preferences section of user preferences. The center label setting is accessed File > User preferences > Labels.
Labs:
Lab ID Management
Lab IDs will now be assigned to a specific lab source to remove any ambiguity about which Lab the ID is for.
Lab Result Summary in Encounter Notes
A change has been made so users can now see the current lab result summary for a lab result without having to filter either by test or by date. To access the lab result summary select the EMR icon > click the Encounter notes tab > the labs area is at the bottom of the window > click the down arrow and select By Tests > right click on an item and select View Lab Summary.
Medical History:
Compare Health Record and Radiology Report Labs in Encounter Notes
An update has been made so that two health record and radiology report labs can now be compared by users in Encounter Notes. To compare the two documents side by side select the EMR icon > click the Encounter Notes tab > click the Documents button > click Configure (to add document types to the compare).
Other:
Delete Letter Macros, Audit Logging
Audit logging has been added for delete letter macros. To access audit logging click User > select Manage Security > click Audit Logs.
Service Start and Stop (ACE Tomcat)
An update has been made to enable client services to more easily access the service start and stop commands for Tomcat. This change also ensures the service name in the Tomcat start and stop commands for ACE matches the service name that Tomcat is using. This is to ensure that Tomcat resets after applying ACE updates. Further logging has also been added to record when Tomcat is started and stopped (if Tomcat cannot be restarted this is also logged).
Patient Demographics:
Pharmacies on Prescription Favorites
When a user creates a prescription from a favorite or multiple favorites Accuro now checks and warns users if the prescription being created has a different pharmacy set from the patient’s default pharmacy. To access prescription favorites select the EMR icon > click the Encounter Notes tab > click the Star button on the Active Medications ribbon.
Performance:
Duplicate Indexes in the Database (MB)
It was reported that duplicated indexes were found in a clinics database. This was checked for validity and any duplicate entries have been removed.
Prescriptions:
Previewing Prescriptions
When a user previewed a prescription and changed the window size to be smaller than the displayed text, some of the information in the window was being hidden. An update has been made to add a horizontal scroll bar (a vertical scroll bar is already displayed, if required) to ensure all the information in the window can be read. To preview a prescription select the EMR icon > click the Medications tab > right-click on an item and select Print/Fax.
Reporting:
Accounts Receivable Summary Report (MB, ON)
An update has been made to the Accounts Receivable Summary report so that the Private Billed column no longer includes written-off bills. The Private Billed column now only includes bills that have not been written off. To access reports from anywhere in Accuro press Ctrl+R.
Favorites in Reports
If a user toggled the “Only Show favorites” checkbox in reports the report that was previously selected was being deselected. An update has been made so that toggling the favorite’s checkbox does not affect the report that is selected. If a user goes from all reports to favorite reports and a report is no longer available (i.e. it isn’t marked as a favorite) the Generate Report and Generate Export buttons are disabled .To access reports from anywhere in Accuro press Ctrl+R.
Patient Status Summary Report
When the report was run a status was selected and Current only was left blank, the report being generated was blank. This occurred because the patient had no history for patient status. An update has been made to change the checkboxes to radio buttons, this means that clients can choose either history or current (the default is current). This ensures that the report is generated as expected. To access reports from anywhere in Accuro press Ctrl+R.
Payment Journal Report (AB)
The Payment Journal report was failing and an error message was displayed because one of the columns of the report had an invalid name. An update has been made to correct this error and the report is now generated as expected. To access reports from anywhere in Accuro press Ctrl+R.
Payment Journal Report (MB)
An update has been made to the Payment Journal report so that when a payer is an insurer the patient’s name is now included in brackets next to the insurer. A column has also been added for invoiced date, tariff code and amount billed. The total for the amount billed is not included as there can be multiple payments against the same bill and therefore the amount would be incorrect. To access reports from anywhere in Accuro press Ctrl+R.
Scheduling:
Referring Provider in the Scheduler
A client reported that the referring provider field was not being populated until a user left the patient demographics area and then returned again. An update has been made to ensure that the referring provider field is refreshed as expected. To access patient demographics select the Patients icon > click the Demographics tab.
Insurer in Appointment Details
An update has been made so users can no longer change the insurer on a paid claim. This was only possible using a very specific workflow that involved using two computers accessing the same appointment details at the same time. To access appointment details select the Scheduler icon > double click on the appropriate appointment.
Pasting Appointment, Scheduler
An update has been made to correct a syntax error that occurred when users pasted an appointment. To view appointments select the Scheduler icon.
Security:
Accuro Update Lock Information
When Accuro is updated, sometimes this involves changes to the database. The first instance of Accuro that is launched by a user creates an Update Lock on Accuro that prevent multiple users from doing the changes at the same time.
Accuro now records the workstation name and the version of Accuro that created this lock to aid in determining which workstation is performing the updates in the scenario where they may be taking longer than expected.
CDM Access, No Provider (SK)
Previously if a user tried to create a CDM worksheet and had no available providers, nothing would happen. An update has been made so that users can now create CDM worksheets even if no providers are available (the user must have the correct permissions to access CDM and EMR). A message is displayed when the worksheet is created warning the user that they do not have access to any providers. To create a CDM worksheet select the EMR icon > click the Encounter Notes tab > click the down-arrow in the Clinical Notes section.
eChart Login (MB)
An update has been made that enables users to be able to edit their eChart username and password (the same as for eReferrals). To edit eChart login details click File > select User Preferences > click Logins.
eChart Login (MB)
When the eChart login failed, the window displayed contained the failed login information and users were trying to repeatedly login with the same incorrect information. An update has been made so that a message is displayed (in red) that indicates the login has failed and to re-enter the password. The password field is now also cleared and the cursor is in this field ready for the password to be entered.
Editing Form and Letter Templates
When the Accuro session times out (or clients switch user and then switch user back again), the form and/or letter template editor were not handling the time-out or switch properly. The form editor sat at the question “Do you want to mark it as under construction?” and the letter template would close without saving. An update has been made to ensure that the letter and form editor window to ensure that timeouts are better handled and the form/letter is now saved automatically. To access the Form Editor or the Letter Template Wizard click Tools > select Form Editor or Template Wizard, as required.
Waitlist:
Cancelling an Appointment Made from the Waitlist
When an appointment is cancelled that is tied to the waitlist the user is asked if they want to put the patient back on the waitlist. If the user clicks Yes then a window is displayed and they are given the option of changing the waitlist status to one of the following: Booked, Completed, Cancelled, Deceased, Tentatively Booked or Re-Book. To access appointments click the Scheduler icon.