Alarms

Alarms can be used to remind users of events like due lab work or to make a phone call to pharmacy. Another use is to remind staff to follow-up on PRN medications, incidents or medication refills.

Alarms can be pre-set by the system administrator or manually set by the end user. Pre-set alarms do not allow the user to set the alarm time. An example of this would be an alarm set to remind the user to follow-up on a PRN medication one hour after administration. These alarms assist staff with adherence to internal policies. Manually set alarms allow each user to specify the date and time for the reminder. For example, a marketer may set an alarm for an apartment showing on Tuesday at 3:00pm.

Audits

Management of the medical record and resident care is efficient in ECS because several tools have been developed to assist managers.

• Immediate notification of missed assignments from electronic flow sheets.
• Nurses have ability to double-check for missing documentation (e.g. PRN medication follow-up, with one easy task).
• Managers may personalize their internal audits and choose to run them daily or weekly.
• ECS can search for missed labs or diagnoses on all in-house charts at one time!

Calendars

The Calendar shows "events" relative to clients in the community for each day of a selected time period. It can be used to display charted information in a time-line fashion. Typically, the calendar is used to display information over longer periods of time. It may be used to view or evaluate such things as To-Do Lists, Census Reports and Incidents.

Compare

ECS allows for the comparison of documented information. Based on parameters set within the system, users are alerted when these parameters are met. One example of using this feature is to remind staff to notify the physician if a blood glucose result was more/less than a particular level. Another example is to alert users of changes in weight (gain or loss). The compare alerts are automatic and are set per individual clinical protocols.

Messaging

Chat

Chat is a form of communication in ECS. This feature allows users logged into ECS to send messages back and forth. If this function is enabled (in user group rights) users are automatically signed into the chat session upon log-in. The chat that occurs in the system does not become a part of the clients record. Once the chat is cleared the information is gone. This feature is often utilized to decrease the amount of overhead paging of employees.

Email/Internal Communication

ECS has the ability to send information to an external email. External meaning the information is sent outside of ECS via the internet or an intranet. This feature may be used to send electronic data to physicians, pharmacies or family members.

The internal messaging feature consists of sending messages between users within ECS. The messages may be direct documentation from the record. For example, every time a client is admitted a notice may be automatically sent to the nurses and managers. Internal communication may also be used for dialog between users unrelated to a particular client record. For example, human resources sends a message to a user that they need to sign up for insurance by the first of the month. When a message is received the user sees an alert. Internal messages may be managed just like email messages.

Electronic Co-Sign

1. When paper copies of physician orders are not kept in the chart, this feature is used to electronically sign the orders. Physicians, nurses and pharmacists may all use the electronic co-sign in this way.
2. To review and sign for other users documentation (e.g. when student nurses are completing clinical rotation, the RN co-signs the students documentation in the medical record).

Pictures/Attachments

Digital pictures and scanned images are able to be stored in ECS. Client pictures are generally used for health record identification purposes. They may be printed on reports such as the face sheet or medication administration records, and they may be displayed on the electronic sign and documenting screens. Other pictures/images could be stored in ECS as well (i.e. pictures of wounds, insurance cards or lab reports). If your community plans to store a large amount of images in the system an individual server for images is recommended.

Reports

ECS has several report writers embedded. There is no longer a need to develop reports in a separate system in hopes of extracting data from your charting system. The Report Maker allows for creation of reports and graphs without using programming codes or commands. The user creates the report with visual editing and links are created to the report from the chart. Our report writer is capable of producing client specific reports (e.g. face sheets), roster reports (e.g. Quality Indicator (QI) reports); pie, bar, line and gauge graphs. In ECS these graphs are interactive allowing the user to 'zero in' or 'drill down' on a particular area. For example, a pie graph that collects information on mental health QI data may have multiple elements: behavioral symptoms, cognitive loss and depression. If the user would like to know which clients exhibited behavioral symptoms the user clicks on that slice of the pie graph.

Scheduler

The scheduler may be used for various types of scheduling. Maintenance departments could use it to schedule routine maintenance; facility transportation could use it for coordinating services, etc.

1. Provider's schedule - In the instance of Facility Transportation the provider would be Facility Transportation and its schedule would be the hours of service.
2. Appointment schedule - In the instance of Facility Transportation appointments are set for transporting clients between locations (shopping, dentist, etc.).

A unique feature of the scheduling component is that the schedule is two-sided, meaning there is a schedule for the provider (e.g. Transportation) AND a schedule for the client. This is extremely helpful to the departments who need to provide service for the client. Nurses can view the client's schedule and see all events for providers in one area.