Tip of the Day: Reprinting Quarterly Reports and Certificates

How do I reprint my Quarterly Capitation Reports?

This is done in the “Search and Reports” module in Vision: right-click on Capitation Reports and click “New”. This will give you an option box to re-run a capitation report. You can choose whichever details you require in here, eg which Dr and which TP. Note that if you’re trying to run a report for a previous quarter, you would amend the default range date to that date and it will print the corresponding report.

How do I reprint my Quarterly Certificates?

This cannot be done from Reports in Registration Links. When the Quarterly Archive runs it saves a copy of the certificates in the c:\extract folder on the computer it was run on. (p:\extract for Bureau sites). You can just go into that folder, find the corresponding file and open it. It should be in a notepad format so you can just click File and Print to reprint it.

Patients with no ethnicity recorded

Due to the requirements of QoF, a common query received on Helpline is how to construct a search for patients who have no ethnicity recorded.

The helpsheet below is a step-by-step guide to creating a search to look for these patients.

How to search for patients with no recorded ethnicity

Tip of the Day: Viewing Deleted Records

To view records which have been deleted from a patients record:

Open Consultation Manager, and select the patient in question.

Click Consultation > Options > Show Deleted Records

The display line at the top of the screen will turn red to indicate Vision is running in “Show Deleted Records” mode.

Click on List. Those categories which are greyed out will have no deleted records within them.

Click on a category to select it; the deleted information will be displayed

You can right click on the result and use Audit Trail to establish who created, amended and deleted the result

To go back to normal viewing mode, Click Consultation > Options > Show Deleted Records again.

Consultation Manager: Getting windows to open in full screen

If new windows in Consultation Manager open minimised like this:

But you want them to open maximised, like this:

Then you need to change the “View Status” option in Vizsys:

(read the rest of this article…)

Searching in Appointments

Introduction

The “torch” icons in the Appointments module allow for free slots to be searched for.

 The first button – the torch with a “wide beam” – will check for all free slots available.

 The second button – the “narrow beam” torch – will allow you to run a search according to criteria of your choosing (see below).

 The numbered buttons provide one-click access to pre-set searches which have been saved on the workstation.

 The final button provides a list of all saved searches in the practice for you to choose from.

Running a Search

Clicking on the second torch button (or clicking Search > Specific Slot, or F4), will launch the following search utility.

This allows you to dictate:

• which clinician’s appointments are included in the search
• which days of the week are searched
• what type of surgery and appointment (normal, book on the day, etc) are searched for
• how many days into the future to search

Once the criteria have been set, clicking Search will provide a list of suitable appointment times which are available.

Saving a Search

Once a search has been constructed, it can be saved for further use by clicking on the Save button.

The search can be given a name, and saved to one of the numbered torch buttons by making the appropriate selection in “Quick Search”.

Note that these searches are workstation specific – although the search will be available to all Vision users, it will only be mapped to a numbered search button on the machine you are currently working on.

If you wish to map a search created elsewhere in the practice to a numbered search button on your machine:

• Click on the second torch button (or Search > Specific Slot, or F4),
• Click on Save
• On the “Select Search Name” box, select the search you wish to save and choose the relevant entry under “Quick Search”
• Click on “Map”. The search will now be available on the Quick Search Button you have chosen.

Therapy Update following Drug Dictionary Install

What is Therapy Update?

“Therapy Update” checks existing therapy records for drugs whose “action group” (previously known as “BNF Chapter”) has changed in the most recent Drug Dictionary release.   It then updates the existing records, so that if in the future you do a search by action group, it will find all relevant records, whether they were added before or after the dictionary update containing action group change was installed by DLM.

How do I run Therapy Update?

This “Therapy Update” process can be run by any Vision user, whilst other users are on the system and multiple/all months updates can be applied with one click.

To run the process, click on the Modules option on the menu bar on the front screen of Vision and select Drug Dictionary Utilities. Within the Drug Dictionary Utilities module, click on the File option on the menu bar and select Therapy Update. Make sure all the versions listed are highlighted, and click Upgrade.

If there are no versions to be upgraded, you will see a message to this effect.

I thought that the Drug Dictionary installation was done automatically via DLM?

The DLM install does update all of the relevant files to enable you to prescribe the new drugs in each dictionary update.   However the Therapy Update re is a function which should be run following a successful drug install.

How do I know when I need to run Therapy Update?

When DLM completes a Multilex Update, a message that reads as follows is displayed in the relevant section of the Mail Gateway Screen.

“0 MDI successful.  Now run the Therapy Update”

However this message is only displayed until DLM runs again the following evening.

You can check at any time whether there are updates waiting to be processed by following the procedure in “How do I run Therapy Update” above.

Mail Manager slow to open?

As suggested by Bradley Sieve, if you’re finding that Mail Manger takes a while to open up, try assigning something to the inbox of the affected users. Once this has been done, Mail Manager should open much more quickly.

Try this for any staff members who are dealing with GP2GP, OOH, etc who have never had mail in their mailbox and are experiencing slowness in opening up Mail Manager.

To do this, open Mail Manager, find a result (in the example below I have used an unallocated one) and right-click on it.

Click Allocate, and choose the staff member who is having the problem of Mail Manager opening slowly.

Once you have allocated a result to them, Mail Manager should open much more quickly. If you don’t want the staff member to deal with the result you have allocated them, assign it back to another staff member.

Ordering Searches

When outputting a search, you may wish to order the results in a particular order - for example, to have the patients grouped together by doctor. To do this, construct your search as normal and select the report output as either Summary Report, Detailed Report or Standard Report.

From the menu, select Edit, then Report Output. You can then use the Report Sorting section to add criteria by which to sort to report output. In the example below, we have sorted firt by registered GP then by surname.

Once you have added the criteria you require, click OK and then click Run to start the report.

Sending a letter to the head of a household

If you need to write to all patients registered in you practice, you may not wish to send duplicate letters to huses where more than one patient lives.

By downloading the instructions from the following link, you can produce a data source that can be used for a mail merge in Microsoft Word to print labels for the “head of household” from a Vision search.

http://www.inps3.co.uk/anm/anmviewer.asp?a=544&z=87

Creating and Managing a Drug Formulary in Vision

A practice Formulary allows you to create a practice-wide preferential list of prescribable drugs. This also allows for quick and easy selection of the most commonly prescribed drugs within Consultation Manager and can help to control generic prescribing. You still have the clinical freedom of selecting drugs outside of the Formulary if required.

To download a complete user guide to creating and managing a drug formulary in Vision, click here click here.

This user guide is in pdf format and requires Adobe Reader. If you do not have this, you can download it for free here.