How to Configure Patient Education Resources

Before you can use the Patient Education Resources, you must set them up in References.

For offices running builds of MacPractice older than 11.16, you can create a Patient Education record by going to the References Ability > Patient Education Resource node, and click the green plus above the sidebar. 

To all other offices on the newest build (11.16+), this node has been moved to the Clinical Ability. To create a new record, Select the Patient Education node and click the green plus within the Clinical Ability. 

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Enter a title and a longer description. Next, set the parameters upon which the resource will prompt then check the Enabled checkbox. Save the record in the Edit menu with Save Record, or use the Command-S keyboard shortcut.

Setting up the qualifications will be the most complex part of creating your education resource. When you first create a qualification line, you will see a Select Type menu. Beneath this menu are six options:

• Diagnosis

• Medications

• Procedures

• Age

• Sex

• Diagnostic Test (Loinc Code)

You can set a qualification based on any combination of these options. Each type will give additional controls after you select it.

For example, we will walk through creating an educational resource for hypertension patients over the age of 65.

This will bring up an additional menu to the right, where you can specify whether you want this education resource to include patients who have the selected diagnosis codes (contains), or patients without that diagnosis (does not contain). We will leave this on "contains" for this example.

Next, click the Select Diagnosis button. This will bring up a window you can use to select which codes to include in the qualification.

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Use the search window to select all hypertensive diagnoses. You may use the search field to narrow down your list of diagnoses. When you have selected all the necessary codes, click OK.

Now we will set the age parameter.

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Click the plus sign to the right of the diagnosis qualification line (A) to add an additional qualification. In this case, we will select Age from the Select Type menu. This allows us to specify this resource should only be used for patients over the age of 65.

Once we have finished setting our parameters, we must save by going to the Edit menu and selecting Save Record, or using the Command-S keyboard shortcut.

If we wanted to create an education resource for patients with hypertension and diabetes, we would not simply select the diabetes codes in addition to the hypertension codes in step 2. If we did this, the resource would activate for any patients with diabetes or hypertension. Instead, we would create an additional parameter, and include the diabetes diagnosis codes, as shown below.

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In other words, in order for the resource to be an option, the patient needs to have at least one match on each qualification row. Each row can have multiple items of a single type associated to it, but the patient only has to match at least one item on each row. If you need to set up a resource that will only be available if the patient has both items associated to him/her, you will need to make sure you specify this on two separate rows. The Education Resource reference can be used in many different ways. Please review the Clinical Decision Rules documentation if you would like more examples of how this feature could be utilized.

Once you start entering records for the Patient Education tab, you may gather reporting data from the Patient Specific Education Resources report. Patients must also have appropriate office visit codes to appear in this report.