User Guide — Multispecialty Practices
For multispecialty practices, athenaOne offers Clinicals functionality to enable providers to share data across specialties. This functionality lets you create specialty-specific encounter layouts and customize exam templates and sections for each specialty in your practice. athenaOne uses the rendering provider's specialty to determine which specialty-specific information to display in the encounter.
Setup
To enable the multispecialty features for your practice, please contact the CSC by selecting Support > Create Case or Call in the Main Menu and open a case.
Default specialties
You can select your default specialty or specialties using the Default specialty view option on the User Preferences page. Click the Selected option to display the list of available specialties at your practice. You can use Control-shift to select multiple default specialties.
Note: If you do not select default specialties, you continue to see all information in the patient chart.
After you select default specialties, the specialty is displayed at the top of the chart. To view additional "hidden" information, update your view via the "all" option. The page is updated automatically to reflect the view you selected.
Because the "default" view is intended to filter out information that you may not be interested in, there will be many times when more information is available for that patient in other specialties and will be hidden.
An icon appears in each section to alert you that information has been hidden and can be seen if you update your view to show all specialties. You can also hover over this icon to see how many additional items would be available if you updated your view.
Provider setup for multispecialty practices
It is critical that each provider's specialty is set up correctly for the multispecialty feature. athenaOne uses the rendering provider's specialty to determine which templates and specialty-specific information to display within the encounter.
Providers use the Specialty menu on the Providers page to indicate their medical specialty. When your practice enables the multispecialty feature, make sure that each provider's specialty selection reflects the medical specialty in which they practice, rather than the provider type, such as "Nurse Practitioner" or "Physician Assistant."
With multispecialty filtering, athenaOne attributes specialty based on the provider's specialty at the time a document or encounter is created. For providers who switch specialties, this filtering provides a more accurate attribution of specialty for historical encounters and documents.
As information is created or received at a practice, athenaOne associates that information with a provider. After the information is associated with the correct provider (for example, phone message, incoming lab result, etc.), athenaOne assigns that specialty to the document. athenaOne uses the specialty to filter the information in the patient chart. This means that providers can choose to see all information regardless of specialty, or they can view information that has been associated with a particular specialty or set of specialties.
Note: Outside an encounter, however, athenaOne does not filter information based on rendering provider specialty. For example, when you have an open encounter, athenaOne displays only the Social History templates for the rendering provider's specialty, whereas in the patient chart, athenaOne displays all social history templates for all specialties in the practice.
Specialty configurations
Specialty configuration for clinical admin pages and sections
With the multispecialty feature enabled, you can customize many exam templates and encounter sections for the specialties in your practice. Once configured, athenaOne displays information (templates, social history questions, etc.) based on the specialty of the rendering provider for that encounter.
Many Clinical Admin pages have Specialty options, which let you associate exam templates with provider specialties.
The following items and sections have information that can be associated with a specialty:
- Encounter Reasons for visit
- Family History
- Past Medical History
- Social History
- Vitals
Note: Vitals excluded from a specialty do not appear in flowsheets for any user belonging to this specialty. - GYN History
- Surgical History
- Order sets
Templates for the following sections can also be assigned to specific specialties:
- History of Present Illness
- Review of Systems
- Well Child ROS
- Physical Exam
- Test Interpretation
- Procedure
For all of these encounter sections within a patient encounter, athenaOne displays encounter information based on the rendering provider's specialty.
Multispecialty filtering for documents and encounters
With multispecialty filtering, athenaOne attributes specialty based on the provider's specialty at the time a document or encounter is created. For providers who switch specialties, this filtering provides a more accurate attribution of specialty for historical encounters and documents.
For example, if a provider switches specialty from OB/GYN to Internal Medicine, all documents and encounters created when the provider was an OB/GYN specialist remain associated with the OB/GYN specialty. Any documents and encounters created after the provider switches to Internal Medicine are associated with the Internal Medicine specialty.
Multispecialty filtering for the patient chart
Multispecialty functionality enables providers from various specialties to coexist within the same practice. Providers in your practice can share a chart across a variety of specialties while filtering out information that they may not need to see. This means when you're looking at a chart, you can see information relevant only to your predetermined set of specialties and the rest will be hidden from your view. Of course, all the information is still available and accessible when you call it up manually.
The patient chart specialty filtering is controlled by the Default specialty view option on the User Preferences page.
You can select your "default" specialty (or set of specialties) so that only information belonging to those specialties is presented to you on the patient chart. You can access the hidden information by selecting the "All" view.
Because sections like Allergies and Medications are considered important to the holistic view of a patient rather than being specialty-specific, we do not apply any filtering in these sections. Therefore, a comprehensive list of medications, allergies, problems, etc., appears at all times, regardless of the specialty settings for that chart.
This table shows which patient chart sections and items are filtered when the multispecialty practice setting is enabled for a practice.
| Section | Filtered? |
|---|---|
| Visits and Cases | Yes |
| Recent Documents and Tasks | Yes |
| Clinical Documents | Yes |
| Results | Yes |
| Admin/Phone Messages | Yes |
| Other Orders | Yes |
| Physician Authorization Documents | No |
| Future Appointments/Reminders | No |
| Clinical Guidelines | No |
| GYN History | No |
| DME | No |
| Allergies | No |
| Medications | No |
| Problems | No |
| Social History templates | No |