Care Guidelines System

The Care Guidelines system helps the provider and patients to take care of their health maintenance and chronic diseases.

You can open the Care Guidelines template using the Care Guidelines link on the template header. It provides both a schedule of typically followed items such as immunizations, diagnostic studies, labs, and so on. The care guidelines system tracks recommendations about medications and goals that might be applicable for the patient's chronic conditions. The care guidelines system is highly configurable.

The Care Guidelines system helps to carry out the functions of Health Maintenance and Disease Management testing and Health Monitor.

Using Care Guidelines:

• Some guideline items are automatically added to each patient’s chart based on the patient’s chronic conditions, while others are added manually by the clinicians; these are added as a group related to a chronic condition, long-term medication use, for health maintenance or any other special circumstance requiring close monitoring.
• At each encounter, all the previously added guideline items which are applicable to the patient are shown on the Care Guidelines template. From there, they may be reviewed, updated, and so on.
• The actions most commonly performed (update guideline status or completed date, enter or update a goal) can all be done by selecting the row on the Care Guidelines template and using the fields below the grid; it is not necessary in most cases to edit the item to update it.
• Items that are updated or changed during the encounter print on the encounter note.
• Guidelines interact with the reminder of NextGen® Enterprise EHR. As orders in the NextGen® Adaptive Content Engine are completed, the guidelines recognize this and recalculate the next due date; active medications in the system are recognized as such; with proper setup of a lab or radiology interface, results received from them will also update guidelines.
• At the practice level, guidelines must be reviewed by the client to ensure their applicability to the particular clinical setting.
• At the patient level, it is often the case that one or more guideline items do not apply to a particular patient; the system enables you to quickly disable those items for that particular patient.
• The schedule of the items that can be care guideline orderables and the recommendations behave slightly differently and are configured in different places.

Care Guidelines is a general term referring to both the Schedule of Orderable items (formerly known as protocols) and Recommended Care items (non-orders). The term Care Guidelines may be used interchangeably with Guidelines. On the Care Guidelines template, both care guidelines orderables and Recommended Care are shown and can be used.

Care guidelines orderables (that is, “items in the care schedule”)

• Include items that are orders in the system, such as labs, diagnostic tests, procedures, and immunizations.
• Can be completed by marking a completion date; many items are then due again after a specified interval, for example, a cholesterol test due annually.
• Can be edited for how they are followed, such as changing the start/stop ages and repeat interval.
• Most users should not have to go into the Edit unless they want to change how a test is followed for a specific patient, that is, start age, stop age, and/or interval.

Recommended Care (that is, “goals” and “recommendations”)

• Are related to a patient’s chronic conditions. There are no recommended care health maintenance items – all of these are scheduled care guidelines orderable items.
• Includes items such as recommended medications, advice to quit smoking or follow a low sodium diet, and goals for lab tests results and measurements related to chronic conditions (For example, LDL cholesterol less than 100)

For more information on Care Guidelines, go to NextGen Healthcare Success Community, and download the Care Guidelines User Guide for NextGen® Adaptive Content Engine.