Requisition reconciliation (or requisition tracking) is a workflow process that helps manage requisitions to ensure nothing gets lost. Requisition reconciliation is a challenging process – sometimes there are requisitions we don’t necessarily want to track (ie. giving patients that get frequent UTIs urine reqs to do when they develop dysuria) and there are sometimes requisitions that we give patients that might not need to get done for another 6-12 months.

Ava Requisition Tracking provides a huge amount of flexibility while still being incredibly easy to use. This tutorial will focus on the basics of requisition tracking. In future tutorials we’ll show you how to set up default tracking on specific requisitions.

1. Adding Tracking to an Individual Requisition

When creating a new requisition for a patient – you might notice a little unobstructive newspaper icon. Clicking on it will start up requisition tracking.

2. Adjust the Default Settings

Clicking the icon will already trigger requisition tracking. That’s it! Only one click!

The default setting sets the due date to 30 days from todays date and assigns the “incomplete” requisition to yourself – it also assigns the priority to “Normal”. You can adjust either of these settings just by changing the values. Ava will automatically save the changes.

If you changed your mind and you don’t want to track this requisition just click the garbage can.

3. Mark the Requisition as “Completed”

Keeping track of what requisitions have been sent out is only half the battle. In order for this to be of any use we’ve got to mark the requisition as “completed” when the results come back in. There’s actually 3 ways to do this (usually I’m a fan of “make one best way to do something” but in this case I promise it’s actually good to have a few ways of marking the requisitions as completed!).

a) Mark the requisition as “completed” when the result comes in

In most cases we want to mark the req as “completed” when we’re reviewing results – it’s a total of 2 clicks and it’s the most natural place to mark requisitions as complete.

If there are outstanding requisitions for this patient you’ll see a “Reqs (1)” highlighted in red. Ava will intelligently only show you requisitions for the type of result you’re reviewing (for example, if you’re reviewing a lab Ava will only show outstanding lab reqs, if you’re reviewing an investigation Ava will only show outstanding investigation reqs).

Click on the checkmark to mark the requisition as “completed.” If there are more than one requisitions you can also click the PDF button to see what was filled out in the req.

b) Mark as completed from the patient chart

Sometimes we might miss updating the requisition from the task screen – that’s ok! Similar to opportunistic screening – we’ve made it very easy to tell if there are any out of date requisitions at a glance:

A green checkmark means the requisition has been marked as completed. A red clock means that the requisition is overdue and the black clock means the requisition is being tracked and is not yet due.

If you want to change any of the settings for this individual requisition just click on the requisition and adjust the values.

c) Incomplete and overdue requisitions

Overdue requisitions (requisitions that have not been marked as completed and have a due date in the past) will show up in your task inbox under “Reqs.” Click on the overdue requisition to open it (just like any other task). You’ll see a familiar looking window that will allow you to change the due date or assign it to another person in your clinic.

We’ve also added a “Labs/Inv.” section on the patient sidebar that makes it easier to check if the patient had completed the requisition. If the patient already complete the requisition just click the “Complete” button to clear the reminder.

4. Summary: The Lifecycle of a Requisition

We’ve worked hard to make sure requisition reconciliation doesn’t have to be an onerous process. To summarize – if you’d like to track a requisition there’s essentially 2 steps:

• Click the “requisition” icon when creating a new requisition for a patient – adjust the default due date as necessary
• When the patient has results come in click the red “Reqs” button in the task screen to mark the requisition as completed

In mot scenarios we’ve identified that managing requisition reconciliation takes 3 clicks in total – one click to enable the tracking and 2 clicks to mark it as completed when the result comes in.

5. Next Steps: Default Tracking

If you think 3 clicks is too many (and honestly, who doesn’t want to click less) we’ve got you covered! In situations where you know you’ll always want requisition tracking (ie. skin biopsy requisitions) it’s possible to set up tracking by default. As a bonus – it’ll reduce the number of clicks from 3 to 2.