Automated patient lists are a great way to create a custom panel of patients that stays updated either daily or weekly depending on your preference.

Ava offers a wide variety of filters that can be used to customize the list such as searching for patients with age greater than 25 or alcohol consumption less than one per week.

Those filters rely on the Boolean logic operators, AND and OR.

This tutorial briefly explains these terms in the context of patient lists and then shows you how to build filters that will bring up the exact patients you want.

Prerequisites:

• You are creating an automated list, not a manual list
• You have selected a starting list as shown in the example below

And

When applied, the AND operator will bring up patients who fit all the specified criteria.

Example

In this case, the search will bring up patients who are both older than 25 and female.

It won’t bring up anyone who is over the age of 25 and non-female.

Or

The OR operator is less picky, it will bring up patients who fit at least one of the specified criteria.

Example

This search will bring up patients who have either had asthma, or had a mammogram in the past year, or both.

So how do we put these handy operators to work making automated lists? The following section addresses this.

Building rules and groups

1. Enter a rule in the blank box as shown in the example below

2. Select AND or OR in the top left of the filters to pick an operator which will join your rules together

3. Enter as many rules as you would like as shown in the example above

4. If desired, add a group

Groups allow you to use another operator and to further refine the search.

The example above will bring up patients who are both over 25 years old and younger than 95 and who are either female or not male.

To help read your search “trees”, follow the “branches” on the left hand side to see which operators join which rules.

In the image below, rules numbered in blue are all joined with an AND operator. Rules numbered in pink are joined with an OR operator.

5. Continue adding groups and rules until the desired specificity of the search is achieved

For further information on Boolean operators and logic you can read this article from the University of Pennsylvania.