# Patient Bar Plug-in Overview

The Patient Bar plug-in is a work in progress. Specific features may undergo minor or significant changes as the plug-in iterates toward national release. The following descriptions and instructions apply solely to the software's state as it existed at the time of this writing.

Located atop all single-patient clinical views, HMP's Patient Bar plug-in provides a consistent, safe way to identify patients. Its ubiquitous at-a-glance summary of your patient's key identifiers—such as the patient's name (which appears in large font so it's easy to make sure you're entering information for the correct patient), gender, date of birth (DOB), and so forth echoes what you see in the top left section of the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) patient bar. The HMP Patient Bar plug-in also includes the patient's location and care-team information, and contains a postings section that lets you know if your patient has warning or crisis notes, directives, allergies, or patient-record flags.

Clicking the plug-in's demographics summary area gives you immediate access to additional demographic information—some of which (telephone numbers) you can edit—while clicking the postings area of the patient bar allows you to view details about the patient's allergies, warning notes, and so forth. Clicking the Care Team area gives you a display of care-team information, such as the care team's name, the primary provider's name and contact information, and more.

### Select a Patient

Although the patient-selection feature is technically not part of the Patient Bar plug-in, the plug-in displays demographic and postings-related information only for the patient you have selected. If you haven't selected a patient, the patient bar displays a No Patient Selected message.

To select a patient, view your CPRS Default patient list, or view a set of patients in the Clinic or Ward list of your choosing, then click to select the patient from the list. Patient-selection lists are available atop the application's left-most pane.

You can search for a particular patient by typing the patient's name in the Search box.

Read more

### View Postings

The Patient Bar plug-in displays the following postings in its right corner. All postings appear in white type against a red background.

- Crisis notes, indicated by the word Crisis
- Clinical warnings, indicated by the word Warnings
- Allergies, indicated by the word Allergies
- Advanced directives, indicated by the word Directives
- Patient record flags, indicated by the word Flags

If none of these items is available for the patient you've selected, the plug-in displays the word Postings in white type against the Patient Bar's background and below it, also in white type against the background, the word None.

View Postings Details

### View a Demographic Summary

For easy reference, the Patient Bar displays the following demographic summary atop all single-patient views:

- Patient name (surname, first-name format)
- Social Security number (nnn-nn-nnnn format, where n is a whole number from zero to nine)
- Date of birth (dd-mmm-yyyy format—01-Jan-1948, for example)
  - Note: This is the HMP default format. You can select other date formats via the application's User Preferences feature, which is available when you select the user menu on the HMP application bar. See the Manage Preferences section for more information.
- Age (ny format, where n is the number of years—60y for example—displays years of age at time of death for deceased patients
- Gender (male, female format)

For inpatients, the patient bar summary includes the following information:

- Location (clinic or ward—Psychiatry, for example)
- Room or bed (003-A, for example)

For outpatients you have selected from a Clinic list, the patient bar summary includes the following information:

- Clinic name
- Encounter date
- Encounter time

View Demographics Details
Update Patients' Phone Numbers

### View Patient Care Information

In its center section, the Patient Bar plug-in displays summary patient care information—either outpatient information from Patient Care Management Module (PCMM) or inpatient information from the Admissions/Discharge/Transfer package. Depending on patients' assignments, this section contains:

- The patient's outpatient primary care team
  - If the patient has no assigned primary care team, no assigned mental health treatment coordinator, and is not admitted to the hospital or community living center, the Patient Bar displays the words: Primary Care Team Unassigned
- His or her assigned outpatient primary care provider (PCP)
- The patient's associate outpatient provider
- The patient's inpatient care team
- His or her inpatient provider
- His or her attending provider
- The patient's assigned mental health treatment coordinator

View Patient Care Details

## Clinical Practice Environment

With its CPE (Clinical Practice Environment) application, the HMP Team Facing framework delivers software that serves healthcare teams and helps meet their needs in caring for our veterans. CPE software will help transition Veterans Health Administration from a chart-centric model of care to a team-based, patient-centered model of care through advanced clinical software and a modern software architecture. This software represents an effort to reestablish close clinician-IT collaborative relationships and to build field-driven, web-based modules that meet the following functional and technology goals.

- Functional Goals:
  - Comprehensive, coded, integrated data
  - Knowledge-driven, context-based decision support
  - Role- and conditions-based workflow-driven systems
  - Multi-patient, team-based care
- Technology Goals:
  - Open source, with a service-oriented architecture (SOA)
  - Web-based, with a flexible, scalable architecture
  - Context-aware, with an extensible, modular platform

While its initial operating capabilities are present, HMP software is a work-in-progress. Specific features and instructions for using them will evolve as our partners in the clinical community evaluate the software and provide feedback, thus realizing the close collaboration between IT and clinical interests that informed this software's genesis.