Further Thoughts on Triggers

[Rickliftig]

How feasible is it for diseases/medications to have a trigger check box?

Example: patient is on coumadin - pop-up appears with "Ask the INR" number"
patient is pregnant - pop-up a list of questions germane to that.
joint prosthesis - reminders of current guideline pop-up - which I believe is now "pre-medicate no matter what" (crock of BS IMHO)

Dental conditions could be listed as diseases (which they are) and generate their own triggers
Example: Perio, High Caries Rate
would print out info sheets

Right click on the disease/condition would have an option to "print the info sheet"

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This is the type of thing I write down when I am listening to a less than inspiring lecture. I love making more work for the Open-Dental Staff.

[jordansparks]

As part of the automation framework? Trigger would be adding a disease, and action would be something like "BuildAutoNote" or "Popup". If adding a disease were turned into a trigger, then the automation framework already knows how to print out info sheets (patient letters). Conditions would have to be part of triggers before it could be implemented, but this is coming soon anyway.

[jclaydds]

Jordan,

It sounds like you are developing in this "Automation" feature exactly what I have in mind. I see the need when entering certain medications that we need triggers to create a pop-up or some way of making it crystal clear to the provider to be aware of potentially serious problems that may be associated with certain medications. It was mentioned in another post about coumadin. If your practice included surgery, I could see this being an important fact that you wouldn't want to see get buried at the bottom of the medication list. Similarly, I believe dentistry is seeing a major shift in recent years as we see patients that are using bisphosphonates and the potentially disastrous side effects that can occur with surgical procedures on these patients.

I know there is a feature in Open Dental that if you list an allergy as a disease on your patient and you set up the appropriate prescriptions to link to this disease, Open Dental will pop up a warning if you try to prescribe that medication. I am hoping we can use the Automation feature to similarly have some way of popping up alerts when a patient is taking these medications. I am trying to figure out when and how often it would be appropriate for Open Dental to alert you. As I get older, it is becoming obvious that my memory is far inferior to the computing power I have at my disposal. I have no trouble admitting that I need to depend on technology to help alert me to pertinent information that will improve the quality of care I provide, keep my patient's more safe by alerting us to any potential interactions these drugs could have with dental treatment and possibly help us avoid legal pitfalls.

Anybody have any thoughts on this? From Jordan's posts, it seems like this Automation feature is being actively developed and I realize we are in the infancy of this feature. I understand that conditions are being developed as triggers. This is exciting stuff!

Thanks,

Jeff

[DavidWolf]

Regrading triggers and pop-ups....Will it be possible to limit the pop-ups for only certain modules?
For example pop-ups regarding clinical issues should not necessarily pop-up in the Appts or Account module.

[jordansparks]

Right. Specifying which module would be a condition. Specifying which disease would be a condition. Probably multiple conditions would be allowed, but a lot of thought is going to have to go into the use of AND and OR in conditions. For example, if you have three conditions. The user might mean any of the following:
cond1 AND cond2 AND cond3
or
(cond1 OR cond2) AND cond3
or
cond1 AND (cond2 OR cond3)
or
cond1 OR cond2 OR cond3 (less likely)
etc, etc.

I know I'm really getting into the nitty gritty of this feature, but this is the sort of thing we need to consider before jumping right into it.