In this release, we excited to announce that Ocean sites may now claim multiple directory listings in Ocean Health Links ("referral targets") instead of just one. This represents a fairly major architectural change although it should be transparent for clients using eRequests today.
If an Ocean site claims a second referral target, a drop-down menu will appear in various places in the Ocean portal to choose the referral target. For example, in the eRequest inbox, you can choose the appropriate referral target to review referrals. In the listings panel, you can choose the listing to update.
This change will be particularly useful for two groups. Firstly, clinics that are chains can now have all referrals received in a single site irrespective of the map listing through which they were sent by the GP. Secondly, individual specialists that are listed in the directory can have their referrals sent through a central booking site (such as a department in a hospital). In both cases, the main advantage is that clinicians can take advantage EMR integration with their primary site.
Other changes in this release:
- We've rearranged the admin tab to be more intuitive by breaking up the security tab into a dedicated "user" tab and a dedicated "encryption" tab.
- It's now easier to activate eReferrals/eRequests from the admin tab
- Usage report now includes eRequests (although note that this will only show eRequests received after the release, so the numbers will seem low initially for existing eRequest clients)
- Fix to OSCAR to avoid network timing issue that would sometimes cause loading problems for the encounter screen
- Re-adding the old PS Suite file importer as "legacy" importer for backwards compatibility
- Improving phone number validation rules in Ocean Online & eRequests (now more phone formats are allowed)