Guidelines and Reports Introduction

Guidelines can act as a supplement to your consultation and provide guidance for patient care and a means of data entry. They might include a recommended prescribing regime, or patient advice which can be printed out and given to the patient. You will build up the guidelines yourself and allow them to be either GP-specific, or used by all the practice.

• Local Guidelines are those you create yourself or import. Local Guidelines may include patient advice, which can be printed and given to the patient, and a list of appropriate prescribing from which you can choose. New guidelines are being devised all the time, and some of these are available to you by downloading from the Vision website, or from the monthly drug dictionary CD. They can then be imported into Vision.
• Management Plans - These are local guidelines in grid format which make data entry easier. You can reach these from the Patient Record screen by right clicking some entries from the left-hand navigation pane and selecting Management Plan. The plan displays under the Management tab.
• Patient Reports are types of Guidelines created primarily to view and print existing information, filtered in specific ways, about a patient or group. These can either be standard reports, for example, an Encounter form, Medical History, Asthma Management, or variations of these, amended to suit your practice. For example, you might design a report to send to the next practice when a patient is removed. Reports can be viewed on screen or printed. See "Patient Reports Overview". The main difference between local guidelines and reports is that double clicking on a report from the Index list in the Management tab goes straight to printing, while a guideline shows on-screen first.

The way that Patient Reports and Guidelines work is similar. You will find that many actions are the same for viewing both guidelines and report. Selection of a report and guideline can be made from the same Select Guideline screen.

If you want to create your own guidelines, you are advised to follow through the chapter Guidelines and Report Maintenance and Quick Summary - Add a new Report first as a straightforward introduction; and Quick Summary - Add a new Guideline.