Tablets FAQ

If your clinic uses non-health card number IDs (e.g., Student Card Numbers), you can use the 'Alternate ID' setting as the Check-in Type.

To Use Alternate IDs to Check-in at Kiosk:

If you review a patient's chart and discover notes contain responses or demographic updates that seem incongruous to the patient, it's highly likely that the wrong patient made updates to another patient's chart.

How does this happen?

This circumstance primarily occurs with devices set to the "staff-initiated" tablet mode. In day-to-day use, accidental user error can occur when staff enter the wrong Ocean reference number into the tablet to unlock it for patient use.

A simply mix up with the reference numbers, for example, entering "132" instead of "123", can queue up a totally different patient than the one staff expect.

When the patient receives the tablet, more often than not, they simply change demographic fields that don't match their own without second thought.

How can I prevent this from happening?

We strongly suggest enabling birthdate validation on all "staff-initiated" devices. This helps ensure that if staff accidentally typo the Ocean reference number used to unlock the tablet, there is a second layer of validation shown directly to the patient to ensure they are the correct person.

Failing to input the correct birthdate will put an immediate halt to the tablet session and force the patient to return the device to the front desk for assistance. This gives staff the opportunity to review and re-enter the correct reference number into the Ocean Tablet application before returning it to the patient.

Enabling Birthday Validation

To turn on birthdate validation, navigate to the "Tablets" tab of the Ocean Portal. Click "Edit" on the applicable tablet group. In the window that opens, select "Introduction", check off "Use Birthday Validation", and finally click the blue "Save" button. (Repeat as necessary for other applicable groups.)

You can make eForms appear automatically, based on a patient's information, by either adjusting your tablet settings (by adding a completion survey or setting up tablet rules) or by using eForm Actions. These automatically-appearing forms will get added into the queue along with any forms that have been explicitly loaded for the patient (through the EMR or the Ocean Portal).

• Tablet Settings

  • Completion Survey
  • 
  • If you just want to add a patient experience survey to the end of the patient's tablet session, you can use the survey invitation feature, which is located in the Preferences tab of the tablet settings. Simply check the "Display a survey or other form after all other forms are complete" checkbox and select the appropriate survey by searching in the "EForm to Show" box. This is easy to set up, but not that versatile because you can't add in clinical forms.
  • Tablet Rules
  • 
  • The most useful method is to set up tablet rules. For any given tablet settings group, you can configure rules using the Ocean scripting language to show a specific eForm if a patient meets a certain set of conditions. For example, you could show the Menopause form for females over the age of 55 (shown below). You can have as many tablet rules in a tablet group as you want. Please review "Tablet Rules" for examples of other commonly-used tablet rules.

• eForm Actions

  • You can also use "eForm Actions" to trigger eForms to be added for a patient, based on their answer to a certain question on a different eForm. These can be set up using the eForm Editor. Visit our article on eForm Actions for more details on how to set up your eForm Actions.
  • 
  • For an example of an eForm Action in action, check out the PHQ-9 and the follow-up suicidal ideation questionnaire that shows up if the patient answers question #9 in a manner that is consistent with suicidal ideation.

You can set up Tablet Rules that will to automatically show appointment-specific forms. These can be very useful for collecting relevant information from patients before their appointment, without having to manually add forms to their queue.

For example, if a patient is booked for a back pain appointment, they could automatically be presented with this Back Pain eForm.

pt.getReasonForVisit() != null && pt.getReasonForVisit().startsWith('Reason')

pt.getReasonForVisit() != null && pt.getReasonForVisit().indexOf('Reason') != -1

pt.getVisitType() != null && pt.getVisitType().indexOf('Type') != -1

For more information on setting up tablet rules, and examples of helpful rules, please refer to "Tablet Rules".

Note: To delete a tablet rule, you will need to have administrative privileges.

Enabling Screen Pinning is the best defence against patient misuse of tablets.

Pinning the Ocean Tablet application will inhibit patients from navigating away from Ocean while using the the tablet. Pinning disables the physical buttons on the device, as well as the notification area that can normally be accessed by swiping down from the very top of the screen.

Please refer to the "Enable Screen Pinning" section of the Securing Your Tablets guide for instructions.

There is a great blog post on our main website about this, which is called "3 Tips to Keep Tablets Safe in a Healthcare Setting – Part 2: Sanitizing".

Fortunately, nothing too serious.

Absolutely no patient information is stored on the device. Therefore, hackers would be unable to gain access to any patient information from the tablet.

From our Ocean servers, we can instantly and permanently deactivate a tablet’s access to the clinic.

A new tablet can then be ordered from Best Buy, Future Shop or Amazon and is usually available within 2-3 business days.

If one of your tablets has been stolen, sign in to the Ocean Portal to deactivate the tablet as soon as you can. If you run into any troubles during this process, feel free to email our support team (ocean.tips/support) and we’ll be happy to help get things back to normal.

Ocean is a primarily a questionnaire platform (as opposed to a general-purpose tablet-based user interface to your EMR).

Currently the tablet and its associated clinical content is designed predominantly for patient use, not for use by clinicians.

However, clinicians are free to use the tablet for data entry purposes, and there are some forms which work well for this purpose.

For security reasons, you probably shouldn’t.

It’s difficult to use a computer or tablet for general purposes without leaving personal data behind on the device. It’s especially risky to set it up with your personal passwords for email or other accounts.

With that said, it is your own tablet, and if you are aware of the risk and prepared to secure it yourself, you can customize it however you like.

Since Ocean Tablet runs on the stock Android system, you can browse Google’s Android support sites for more information.

Yes, you can easily deactivate a tablet that you no longer wish to use.

• To deactivate your old tablet:

  • Login to the Ocean Portal. Click the "Menu" button in the top left corner and select "Tablets & Kiosks". 
  • 
  • Find the tablet(s) that you would like to deactivate, click on it, and select "De-register". The tablet(s) is now deactivated.

• To set up your new tablet:

  • Follow the usual steps to set up Ocean on your tablet (please refer to our Ocean Tablets Set-Up Guide for detailed instructions).
  • Log in to the Ocean Portal. Click the "Menu" button in the top left corner and select "Tablets & Kiosks".
  • 
  • Ensure that your newly set-up tablet is under the right settings group in the Ocean portal. New tablets are automatically added to the "Default" settings group. If you want to change this, drag and drop the new tablet into the correct tablet group.

• Re-registering a device 

  • If you'd like to re-register your tablet, you can do so from the Ocean Tablet Administration Menu.
  • 
  • Open the Ocean Tablet app on your tablet.
  • Tap the Ocean logo (or cog) at the bottom left corner of the main screen.
  • Enter your Ocean username and password to access the Administration Menu.
  • Note: You will need to have admin access to your Ocean site to be able to access this Administration Menu on your tablet (to learn how to grant admin access to users, please refer to "Granting Users Administrative Access to Your Ocean Site").
  • From the Administration Menu, select "Deregister".
  • Complete all empty fields on the screen.
  • Reboot the Ocean Tablet app.
  • Note: After re-registering a tablet, it will automatically appear in the Default Settings group in the Tablets and Kiosks page of the Ocean Portal.