Classification Tagging
A few weeks ago we introduced the Circumstances Of Admission field to help you tag your patients with any and all reasons the patient was admitted to your hospital. The reception for this field has been very positive and we thank you for your feed back. However there are still two items we want to address:
How do you tag patients with what's clinically abnormal?
What if you want to use tags that are not available?
Diagnostic Classification Terminology
Very soon we will be adding two new classification tagging fields: Clinical Classifications and Categorization Of Clinical Signs. The fields will help you tag your patients with the abnormal physical exam findings by body system and what caused the abnormal physical exam findings.
So there will be 3 classification categories:
Circumstances of Admission (ex: Cat interaction, Vehicle collision, …)
— Why did the rescuer bring me this animal?
Clinical Classifications (ex: Physical injury, Neurologic disease, …)
— What are the physical exam findings by body system?
Categorization Of Clinical Signs (ex: Trauma, External parasites, …)
— What caused the abnormal physical exam findings (Clinical Classifications)?
The Clinical Classifications and Categorization Of Clinical Signs fields can be found with the Diagnosis field.
Reminder: If you want to use the Classification Tagging fields, go to Settings and choose Classification Tagging under the WRMD settings box. From the Classification Tagging settings page you can activate these new fields.
As of the date of this blog post, the Clinical Classifications and Categorization Of Clinical Signs fields DO NOT have an automatic tagging feature like the Circumstances Of Admission field does. In the future we will add that feature.
Additionally, if you want to see a list of all the terms for each category and their hierarchical organization, you can view that on the Classification Tagging settings page. We are working on a list of each terms definition that will be made available from the Classification Tagging settings page as well.
Custom Terms
The terms in each category are meant to encompass, at a baseline level, the most common situations encountered in wildlife rehabilitation. For example, the Clinical Classifications category only classifies to the body systems, not to each individual organ or body part. You may use the terms in the classification tagging fields as-is or you may now also add custom terms for specific classifications that your hospital encounters. Your custom terms must be assigned to an existing root or leaf node of the terminology hierarchy. For example, you could use the Circumstances of Admission term "Cat interaction" or add the custom term "Feral cat" under Cat interaction in order to track that detail.
That's It!
We hope you enjoy the new fields and are having a safe year!