Overdue and Expiration Intervals

The Overdue and Expiration Intervals apply to Orderable Items. When you enter a lab, imaging or referral order, that order will go into an electronic tickler file. When the patient fails to complete that order, EHR will send an overdue message to our staff, so they can decide what to do. These fields tell the system when to generate the overdue order tasks or expired order tasks.

Each orderable item has 10 fields for Overdue Intervals (2 for each Priority Default) and 2 fields for Expiration Intervals. This is because for every interval you must set an interval unit.

Overdue Interval Values

0-365

Overdue Interval Units

Second, Minute, Hour, Day, Week, Month

Example of what it looks like in SSMT

PRIORITY DEFAULTS

ASAP: Order is to be fulfilled as soon as possible.

Pre-Op: Order must be fulfilled prior to an operation (surgical procedure).

Routine: Order is standard part of a procedure and may be scheduled to be fulfilled routinely.

Stat: Order fulfillment is the highest priority and must be fulfilled immediately.

Today: Order fulfillment must occur the same day as the order is created.

THINGS YOU MUST KNOW BEFORE ASSIGNING ORDER INTERVALS

The default Interval for a new orderable item is 0.

0 means that the order will never become overdue or expire.

The maximum allowed value for the Overdue Interval fields is 365.

Important: Beware... although you will be able to load higher numbers in SSMT without error, be assured any number higher than 365 will behave as 365 and not as the higher number you just put in.

The maximum allowed value for an Expired Interval field is 100, not 365.

Important: Beware...You will be able to load higher numbers in SSMT without error, but beware, it did not take and when you go into TWAdmin into the OID and search for the order it will error there, indicating that the value of 200, 365, etc... is not recognized value.

ENTERING EXPIRATION INTERVALS AND INTERVAL UNITS The Expiration Interval field was designed to recognize the numbers 0-100. If you have the need to use a value over 100, we will need to enter a value based on months in the Expiration Interval field and Month in the Expiration Interval Unit field on the SSMT spreadsheet.

If I want my order(s) to expire after 365 days, I would need to set the Expiration Interval field to 1 and the set the expiration interval unit to 5 (5 equals 1 year). These units of time are defined in the HMP Frequency Unit Dictionary.

In Brief If you want someone to be notified of an order that is 30 days overdue, you would set the overdue field to 30. If you don't want to notify anyone, just set to 0.

Setting the intervals

During an upgrade, your task here is to review and change if necessary, the Overdue Interval levels for each Orderable Item. You will be working with SSMT to complete this task.

Login to SSMT Choose OID - Orderable Item from the drop down. Choose the first category, for the purposes of this article it is Diagnostic Orders (shown in picture). Extract this category.

Copy and paste into Excel (use the SSMT extract and load instructions if you are not familiar with SSMT Look for the following columns in the Header Section, this is where you enter the overdue intervals.

OverDueINTervalRoutine

OverDueINTervalStat

OverDueINTervalASAP

OverDueINTervalToday

OverDueINTervalPreOp

ExpirationInterval

Important: The OverDueINTervalPreOp may be missing on your ssmt spreadsheet, this is being worked on by Allscripts and should be available asap.

Fill in all of the Overdue and Expiration Interval fields.

Load the data back into SSMT.

Extract the very same data and verify that all of the overdue fields and the expiration field have the data you entered.

Move on to the next Order Type, (i.e. imaging, lab etc...) within the OID - Orderable Item Category until you have completed all of the categories you wish to use in conjunction with overdue intervals.