Medical Clinics

1 Overview

This product has 3 sample forms that can be used to complete a process. Although the example is for a medical clinic the same approach could be used for any process. In the case of the medical clinic process steps are::

A patient is registered as a new patient or as a returning patient in which case their details can be reviewed and updated.
The doctor sees the patient, reviews their history and provides another consultation during which they may prescribe some medications.
A nurse dispenses the medications prescribed by the doctor.

Each of the process participants has their own device on which notifications will appear. Hence the doctor will get a notification when a patient has been registered. This notification will appear as a list entry with the patient’s name on it. When the doctor is ready to see the patient, then they can select the patient’s name to see their details and record the new consultation.

The registration person is the only one who needs to select the empty form which has a yellow icon like a clipboard. The nurse and the doctor will get forms pre-populated with patient data. These will show as a white clipboard icon.

2 Initial Setup

2.1 Server Settings

It’s a good idea to set fieldTask to automatically refresh so that when, for example, a new patient is registered, the doctor will get that patient's file on their phone without having to manually press the reload button.

Go to the users page
Select the “Field Task Options” tab
Enable “Automatic synchronisation”
Also set “Delete Submitted results” to “on”. This will remove patient files from the phone after the consultation.
Press the save button

2.2 Create a Project

Logon
Select the menu “Users”
Select the project tab and create a new project

2. 3 Create Users and Roles

You will need some users who will be registering patients, treating them and dispensing pharmaceuticals.

We can use roles to control which forms a user can see and whether or not they get notified of a newly registered patient or a patient that needs to be dispensed pharmaceuticals. These roles can be quite complex, for example they can be used to allocate patients to specific doctors however for this example we are just going to differentiate job types.

Go to the users page
Select the roles tab
Click “Add Role”
Create a role named “register”
Repeat to create a role named “doctor”
Repeat to create a role named “dispense”

Create a register user

Select the “Users” tab
Click on the “Add User” button
Set their ident to “register”
Set their name to something that makes sense to you (Probably just “Register”)
Either specify their email so they can set their own password or set a password for them. In this example we are creating a generic user that different real people might use so you should probably specify the password. If instead we were creating a user account for a specific person who would act as the “register” then you may want to send them an email so they can set their own password. Use strong passwords!
Give them a security group of “enum” which allows them to fill in a form but nothing else
Give them access to the project you created in the previous step
Give them the “register role”

Repeat for a doctor who should get the role of “doctor” and a nurse who should get the role of “dispense”.

2.4 Load the forms into the project

First upload the register form

Select the menu “Forms” or if you can’t see that select “modules” and then “Admin”.
Click on “Upload Form”
Click on “Choose File” and select the register form
Click upload

Now upload the doctor form however we want to group these forms together so that they can share data.

Click on “Upload Form”
Click on “Choose File” and select the doctor form
Set the “Group” to the register form.
Click “Upload”

Repeat for the dispense form, again set the group to register

When you are grouping forms in this way it is not important which form you set as the group form however all members of the group must refer to the same group form.

2.5 Set visibility of forms (optional)

If you want the doctor form to be only visible to users with the doctor role then:

Click on the name of the doctor form on the form management page
Click the menu “Files” then “Roles”
Enable the doctor role

Repeat for the register and dispense forms enabling the appropriate role in each case.

2.6 Configure Notifications

Got to the tasks page by selecting the “modules” menu and then “tasks”.

2.6.1 Doctor Notifications

Select menu “Task Group” then “Add task group”
Give it the name of “doctor”
Select the “create from existing data” checkbox
Set the existing survey to the register survey
Select the “Update existing results” checkbox
Select “Create tasks from results submitted after this task group is created”
Set the new survey to the doctor survey
Set the assignment type to “Role”
Set the “assign to users with role” to “doctor”
Select save

These settings are shown in the picture below.

2.6.2 Nurse Notifications

Select menu “Task Group” then “Add task group”
Give it the name of “nurse”
Select the “create from existing data” checkbox
Set the existing survey to “doctor”
Select the “Update existing results” checkbox
Select the “Create tasks from results submitted after this task group is created” checkbox
Set the new survey to “dispense”
Set the assignment type to “Role”
Set the “assign to users with role” to “dispense”
Select save

2.7 Adding the reference data

The doctor and nurse forms both get their list of medications from a CSV file. To make this available to the forms you will need to load in onto the server.

Select the “Shared Resources” Menu
Click the “Add Files” button and select the medication.csv file
Click the upload button

3 Trying it out

You will need three android phones with fieldTask installed; one with the register user, when for the doctor and one for the nurse.

Press the refresh button on fieldTask to download the forms and the settings for the phone from the server. As earlier we set the phones to auto update then from now on changes to forms on the server and new patient registrations should automatically be reflected on the phones. However if an expected patient does not appear on your phone then you can try pressing refresh again.

3.1 Rejecting Tasks

If the patient left before seeing the doctor they can do a long press on the patient’s icon and then select “reject” from the menu.

4 Reporting

You can use Smap’s reporting functions available from the analysis module. There you can select one of the 3 forms and it will show the collected data for that form. There are two issues with this that you may want to address. Firstly you will only get incomplete views of the data, either the registration view, the doctor’s view or the nurse’s view depending on the form you selected. Secondly there will be quite a few data columns containing data used to support the process and format the information on the phones. You don’t really want this data cluttering up your reports.

You can address both of the above issues by creating a new form that has the questions from the other three forms in it. Then load this into the same group. Do you reporting on this overview form.

You can also use “roles” to hide columns the register, doctor, nurse forms if you wish.

5 Customising the forms and the process

The forms that have been included in the product are much simpler than the ones that you would use in a real medical clinic. However you can take these as the starting point and add more questions or even more forms to meet your needs. If there are additional capabilities that you need for your particular situation then don’t hesitate to contact us at Smap or Zarkman and we will see if the system can be enhanced accordingly.

The following considerations when designing your form are particularly relevant to creating a “process” using linked forms. For more general form design instructions refer to the documentation available at the Smap web site or xlsform.org.

Key Policy

You can set the key policy for a survey to “merge” and specify a key, which would be a question or a combination of questions, that will be used to identify the unique records. So in the example surveys in this product the key is the patient id. If a survey submits data for that patient then if the id already exists the data will be merged. Unanswered questions from the new survey will be filled with data from the old one and then the old survey will be replaced. However for sub-forms the new records will be appended to the existing records. Hence you can update the name of a patient and then append the new consultation record.

If you also want the sub-form data to be merged then you can put a parameter of “merge=yes” on the begin repeat. This is done for the nurse survey where we want the information on which medications were dispensed to be added to the same record created by the doctor indicating which records have been newly added.

5.2 Reference sub forms

Sometimes you want to allow the user to add another record to a repeating group but you don’t want to allow them to modify previous records. This is the case in this example process where we want to allow the doctor to review previous consultations in read only mode and then to add the outcome of a new consultation.

You can do this by setting a property value of “ref”, for reference, on a begin repeat. For an example refer to the “begin repeat” prev_consultation_rpt in the doctor form.

This has the parameter ref=consultation_rpt. consultation_rpt is a normal sub form. The effect of this is that the data for prev_consultation_rpt is pulled out of the consultation_rpt form as a read only copy.

A little bit later in the form they can enter the new consultation into the consultation_rpt sub form.

5.2.1 Questions in “reference” sub forms

You cannot use a type of calculate to get a value into a reference form. Calculates are only calculated on the phone. Hence you should use a question type of “text” when referencing a calculate question completed by another sub form.

The name of each question in the reference form will be the same as the real sub form but it will have an “_” underscore in front of it.

In the reference form we have a text question with name "_medication_1_val"

In the real form we have a calculate question with name "medication_1_val"

Apart from calculates you can use the same question type for your reference question as the real question.

5.2.2 Hiding the reference questions

The normal way to put hidden data into a form is to use a calculate. However when you are referring to a question in a reference sub forms then you can’t use a calculate. This is awkward if you just wanted to use the answer to the question to create another value using calculations as we do in the doctor and nurse forms. To support this there is a new appearance of “hidden” that will hide a text, select1 etc question.

5.3 Ordering the data pulled from a sub form

You can scroll through multiple records that were added by a previous form however if you want to do this in reverse order, most recent first, then you can add a parameter "order=reverse" to the new sub-form.

5.4 Limiting the number of records pulled back from a sub form

In the medical clinic process we might have wanted to only see the last consultation. For that case we could have added the parameter “instance_count=1”, to the prev_consultation_rpt sub form.

However we wanted to see all previous consultations so we didn’t do this. But in the consultation_rpt we did not want to see any of the previous consultations as this is the sub-form that is going to add the new one. So we added the parameter “instance_count=0”