Overdue and Expiration Intervals

The Overdue and Expiration Intervals apply to Orderable Items. These fields tell the system when to generate overdue order tasks or expired order tasks. Each order has one field for Expiration Intervals and 4 to 5 columns for Overdue Intervals. This is because the Overdue Intervals are based on Priority Defaults as listed below.

The Priority Defaults are as follows

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 should know before adding your intervals

The default Interval for a new orderable item is 0

The maximum value of an overdue Order is 365

0 means that the order will never become overdue

Any number over 365 will be processed in the EHR as 365. Even if it allows you to enter it, it will never exceed 365.

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.