User:Shawndouglas/sandbox/sublevel1
What types of providers are ordering COVID-19 tests? From surgeons ordering for pre-operation procedures and emergency room physicians for ER patients, to pathology groups and home health care or assisted living centers ordering for their patients, a wide variety of provider types exist. Those provider types and their special needs should be addressed. For example, physicians of record for home health care clients may not only require support for digital signatures in order entry, but additional verbal authorization of the test may also be required. The system should have a means for verifying that these order entry components are entered by the provider.
Healthcare facilities may also require additional flexibility for portal account creation and use. For example, they may find it useful to have portal log-ins tied to a facility rather than a specific physician. An entity may even wish to provide in-house staff or other related workers access to their COVID-19 test report via the portal, requiring role-based permissions to be built into the portal. Be sure to consider who needs access to what information and whether or not the LIMS or LIS can securely meet those needs.
Some healthcare systems will require the order entry portion of the provider portal make disease-specific checks or require disease-specific patient symptoms to be entered as part of the order. In the case of COVID-19, a wide majority of healthcare settings are still requiring the patient to be indicating clinical and/or epidemiological evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection before testing may begin. Does the system provide checks for testing requirements or, at a minimum, allow documentation of patient aspects such as body temperature, symptoms, travel history, and existing health conditions as part of order entry? This may be implemented through something as simple as comment boxes or through a more refined form with checkboxes and other input areas. These checkboxes and test requirements can further aid with automated triaging.[1]
References
- ↑ Weemaes, M.; Martens, S.; Cuypers, L. et al. (2020). "Laboratory information system requirements to manage the COVID-19 pandemic: A report from the Belgian national reference testing center". JAMIA: ocaa081. doi:10.1093/jamia/ocaa081. PMC PMC7197526. PMID 32348469. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7197526.