Community Information Integration & Central Patient Attachment Registry (CII/CPAR) is a provincial program that connects community physician Electronic Medical Records (EMR) to the health system through Alberta Netcare.
The Community Encounter Digest (CED) is proving to be very valuable for providers in emergency departments and hospitals. They can see if the concern for which the patient is presenting is new or has previously been a reason for an encounter in the community. There have been several cases where urgent care providers have reached out to community providers for additional information that has significantly improved patient outcomes, and, in some instances, saving lives.
Community Encounter Digest (CED)
The CED report is created in Alberta Netcare by summarizing care the patient has received over the past 12 months from all community-based clinics participating in CII in Alberta. Information feeds the CED from the following areas:
- Service providers and delivery location
- Encounter: patient reason and provider assessment
- Health concerns (problems/profile items)
- Possible allergies
- Observations: Blood Pressure, Height, Weight, Pulse, Oxygen Saturation, Head Circumference
- Immunizations
- Referral requests (these remain on the CED for 36 months)
*Information is not pulled from subjective or note fields
The CED is a rolling snapshot of care that an Alberta patient has received to provide an at-a-glance view for other providers.
Information is added to the CED if it is recorded during a patient visit. For example, if a provider records a new problem/profile item during a visit, it gets added as a line in the Health Concern History area of the CED. If no new problem/profile item is recorded during that visit, a new line will not be added to the Health Concern History area. In the Measured Observations area, if a BP is recorded, it will be added, but if there is no height, weight, pulse, oxygen saturation, or head circumference recorded during that visit, those boxes will be blank.
CII does not search the chart of a patient and transfer or collect information from visits before the clinic was live on CII. Information appears on the CED only for encounters that happen after going live on CII.
Participating providers are provided a map for their EMR so that they can understand how some of the information they enter into the EMR informs the CED. A provider can choose to use features of their EMR to keep information from flowing to the CED.
The disclosure statement at the bottom of the CED is in line with the terms and use of other information in Alberta Netcare. The information is ‘as is’ and does not represent a medical history or summary.
Where is the CED found in Alberta Netcare?
The CED is found in a folder in the Clinical Document Viewer tree in Alberta Netcare called Community Reports.
Every Albertan who has visited a CII enabled provider in the past 12 months has a CED in their Alberta Netcare record. Newer versions of the CED will replace any prior versions in Alberta Netcare. An updated version will show as bolded (unread) for Alberta Netcare users.
Other documents complement the CED
The CED is not meant to be a comprehensive record or a patient summary. The Patient Summary is under development, and it is meant to be the comprehensive summary of the patient curated by the patient’s primary care provider.
Specialty care providers using CII can share select consult reports to Alberta Netcare. These are found in the Consultations folder in Alberta Netcare.
Can Information on the CED be corrected?
If a participating provider wishes to modify past entered information, they will need to re-open the encounter/visit where it was entered, modify the entry, and then sign it off again. For details, see your EMR vendor help file for CII Encounters. The changes will be reflected in the CED in Alberta Netcare.
If any previously submitted information is later removed from the patient’s chart at the clinic (due to a correction or data entry error, for example), that information will be updated on the CED with strikethrough font to show that it no longer applies for this patient.
CII/CPAR Key Concepts: The Community Encounter Digest Report
Sample Community Encounter Digest
Two CED examples are provided. The first page shows physician encounters; the second page shows allied health provider encounters.