Managing Guidelines

Guidelines are clinical decision support alerts that appear when specified clinical conditions are met. For example, if you want to display an alert advising an OCT for patients 65 and older who have diabetes, you can create a guideline that identifies those patients and displays an alert at the top of the patient's chart. Clinical staff must acknowledge the guideline to hide the alert for a specified period of time.

Enable individual guidelines in each Managing User Accounts and Passwords.

What do you want to do?

  1. Log in to the Encompass web application as an administrator.
  2. Locate the Guidelines group and expand it if needed.
  3. Click Manage Guidelines.

    The Manage Guidelines page opens.

Create a new guideline

  1. Open the Manage Guidelines page. for more information, go to Open the Manage Guidelines page.
  2. Enter the Alert Name and Alert Message. Both fields will be visible to clinical staff.
  3. Click the Acknowledge For drop-down and select how frequently the alert should be displayed.
  4. Select the Status toggle to activate the guideline. The Status is active by default.
  5. Select the Show Info Button toggle to display a link in the alert to patient education material in MedlinePlus.
  6. Add the conditions that should trigger the alert.
  7. Optionally, add the bibliographic information as needed.

Add and edit guideline conditions

  1. Open the Manage Guidelines page. for more information, go to Open the Manage Guidelines page.
  2. Create a new guideline or select one from the list to edit it.
  3. Click the Edit Conditions link.
  4. Click the Type drop-down menu and select a condition category.

    Depending on the Type, you are presented with text fields or drop-down menus.

  5. Enter or select the required criteria based on the condition type.

    For such condition types as medication, allergy, problem, and procedure, the Description field acts as a keyword search. For example, if you select Problem from the Type drop-down, and you enter "diabetes" in the Description, Encompass will search the patient's problem list for diabetes and alert the clinical staff if found.

  6. Click Add Another Condition to further refine the alert criteria as needed.

    Each condition you add further refines the alert criteria. For example, if you selected diabetes for the first condition and Age ≥ 65 for the second condition, only patients who have a problem of diabetes AND age 65 or older will trigger an alert.

  7. Click Done.

Document optional bibliographic information

  1. Open the Manage Guidelines page. for more information, go to Open the Manage Guidelines page.
  2. Create a new guideline or select one from the list to edit it.
  3. Locate the Source Attributes section on the page and enter any details as needed.
  4. Click Done.

Edit a guideline

  1. Open the Manage Guidelines page. for more information, go to Open the Manage Guidelines page.
  2. Click the guideline Name to open it.
  3. Edit the details as needed and click Done.

Deactivate a guideline

  1. Open the Manage Guidelines page. for more information, go to Open the Manage Guidelines page.
  2. Click the guideline Name to open it.
  3. Click the Status toggle to inactive and click Done.

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