Following up on referred out tests with external labs

Hi, At the site that i am working from, implementing Bahmni, some lab investigations get referred out to external centres. The entry is made in openElis as referred out and results are entered in it when they arrive. There are defined turn around times of these centres. Based on this the patients are asked to come back. However sometimes the centres don’t report back the result in time. This gets noticed when the patient comes to hospital and the doctor checks that patient record again. This is too late especially in case of some bacteriology tests ( and has multiple bad effects - impact on patient care, possibility of increased spreading of infection in community, waste of an appointment in an extremely busy OPD and patients visit to hospital some of which come from far off places. ) Doctors and in house lab technicians would like to proactively follow up with the centres for results as soon as they become overdue. They right now maintain a separate spreadsheet manually.

How can Bahmni help with this? some of the components could be…

  • Report of referred out tests including referred out centres, date of sending the sample, expected date of getting the results, status of result ( awaited | received | overdue) and date of receiving the result. (awaited is simple. for overdue the criteria could be either based on preconfigured time, user entered time or system calculated average turnaround time. any one way should be ok)
  • Patient dashboard showing ETA(Expected time of arrival of result (based on same as above. a case to consider would be if after follow up with referred out centre the ETA changes)

One solution i can think of as the problematic area right now is bacteriology, is to setup bacteriology in Bahmni and have a computed field as part of the bacteriology form. https://bahmni.atlassian.net/wiki/display/BAH/Auto-Calculation+of+Observations. On the basis of the centre and selected test, compute a field called "ETA of result”. Setup a DateConceptValuesPatientsList canned report on this field. But

  • this canned report report does not provide the ability to show other concepts like referred out centre.
  • for other tests, a report in elis would still be required.

How does the Bahmni team recommend solutioning this?

You can create custom reports which can be run on OpenELIS as well. In report type you need to use “ElisGeneric” as the type for such reports.

For the lab person, in order to satisfy this requirement, what do you think is missing from OpenELIS page which shows the referred out tests.

Just to close the loop. The ability of creating custom reports which can be run on OpenELIS worked very well. I was able to create the needed report and the team had started using it. I have also written an article sharing various reports being used for scenarios like these

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