Discharge Instructions

You may also want to provide your injury patients with directions for additional care. This information can be recorded in advance (again, in free text) on the Task Prototype screen in the Injury Discharge Instructions field. When the Include Task on Discharge Reports? field on that screen is also checked and the order based on that Task Prototype is attached to the patient’s appointment, the injury discharge information will be included on the patient copy of the Discharge Summary Report. This is a very useful way to provide comprehensive instructions for crutch use, wound care, care of sprains/strains, etc. Such tasks should be stored in the Discharge Orders/Patient Instructions group/subgroup for easy retrieval.

If you are using the Discharge Summary Report, the Injury Discharge Instructions will not automatically appear on the employer’s copy. Discharge instructions can be included on the employer copy of the discharge report when appropriate by changing the specification value to Yes on the report setup screen before printing. You can also change the default specification settings for this or any other report yourself (if you have appropriate rights) from the File Maintenance > Report Library screen.

The text that appears in the Item Description field of the order prints on the discharge report along with the text of the Injury Discharge Instructions memo. This makes it possible to use the description field to enter a brief instruction line (up to 40 characters) such as “read literature on obesity” or “stop smoking” to the discharge report on the fly. You must first create a generic patient instruction task prototype following the instructions provided above, but do not enter any text into the instruction memo. Do, however, enter a blank space into the memo field and then save it. (SYSTOC will not print a task description unless it detects the presence of text in the memo, even if that presence is a blank space.) Then select one generic memo prototype for each line you want to add and modify the entry in the Item Description field entry to suit your needs.