More information about Ocean's integration with TELUS PS Suite.
For PS Suite Users
For Med Access Users
Your client ID is the first 6 letters on the URL that you use to login to your EMR.
For example, if your login is https://abcdef.med-accss.net, ABCDEF is your CLIENT ID.
Some of our sites have informed us that only a subset of their appointment providers show up in the list of available providers during Cloud Connect's configuration. The missing providers are usually appointment providers linked to a particular "Billing MD". PS Suite hides providers from Cloud Connect's schedule request if it believes that a provider belongs to a PSS location that is not accessible to the user associated with the Cloud Connect activation. Locations are a PSS-specific security setting that allows one clinic to keep a population of patients segmented privately from another clinic when both clinics are using the same PSS server. Many sites have this feature enabled in their PS Suite without their users' knowledge.
If the schedule appears with a blank Billing MD, you can conclude that the schedule is indeed missing due to an inaccessible location. You may be able to leave the Billing MD blank if the schedule doesn't need to be linked for billing purposes (some clients have decided to simply leave it blank). However, if leaving the Billing MD blank is not an option and the first set of steps in this article failed to correct the problem, there may be additional configuration or workarounds necessary requiring TELUS' and our assistance.
Note: Following these steps only changes the Ocean site for the computer being used. You will have to repeat these steps for other computers running PS Suite.
If you are attempting to remove an Ocean site, you will be prompted to enter a permission code. Please contact us at ocean.tips/support and specify you are requesting the code to remove a site number from the Ocean Custom Form.
There are a few things to be aware of when moving over to the new TELUS API integration from the original Ocean custom form integration. We recommend reviewing this article before making this change.
The TELUS API integration will enable features for an improved user experience, including (but not limited to):
Now that you're ready to get started, go ahead and follow the steps in our updated PS Suite Ocean Set-Up Guide.
In order to take advantage of the new Ocean features that come with the TELUS API, you will first need to upgrade your Ocean custom form and toolbar.
The new Ocean toolbar has enhanced functionality that replaces the need to insert the Ocean custom form in the chart. You can learn more about these changes in "Moving to the New TELUS API – What You Need to Know".
Please enter your site number below to check if you need to complete the Telus Connection Request Form:
Please download and fill out the Telus Connection Request form and submit it to our support team ocean.tips/support.
Once we've received your request, we will confirm that we've received it and activate your site for the Telus API.
Please contact TELUS directly and request to be enabled and connected to the API. Once you have signed your TELUS contract agreement, move on to the next step. If you require additional assistance, please contact our support team at ocean.tips/support.
That's not a valid site number. Ocean site numbers are four digits long and only contain numbers. If you're not sure what your Ocean site number is, please refer to "Where do I find my Ocean site number?".
If you already have an Ocean toolbar installed, you will need to ensure the new .cfm filename matches your existing Ocean toolbar filename. Also, please note that any customized links that you may have added will be lost.
If you added a link to Ocean on an existing custom toolbar, the link will be not be supported once the new Ocean Toolbar is installed and activated. We recommend clinics remove any Ocean-related links from custom toolbars and rely on the Ocean Toolbar instead.
Now you will need to enable and setup Cloud Connect. You can complete these steps by following along with our TELUS PS Suite Integration Set Up Guide. Since you've already completed some of the set up steps you can jump in at Enabling Cloud Connect.
The new TELUS API integration allows Ocean to read and update values for patients within the EMR, without requiring the user to open the patient's chart. Although this API provides some great new functionality for Ocean users (such as automated kiosk check-in), it has some limitations that require workarounds, outlined below.
Unfortunately, some important data elements in the API are not currently accessible to Ocean (see tablet below). As a result, these fields cannot be pulled from the EMR and displayed on the tablet (or an Ocean eForm), nor can they be updated by Ocean when a patient changes it.
The ability to update some of these fields is important for certain Ocean workflows, such as when a patient updates their demographic on a kiosk or when a patient fills out a form that is mapped to a PS Suite custom form (e.g. perinatal questionnaire).
Fortunately, enhanced functionality of the Ocean Toolbar has been developed to work around this limitation. The Ocean Toolbar can set these missing values automatically for users, but only once the patient's chart is opened.
When Ocean sees a field update request for one of the fields that the API does not support, it places it in a special "Ocean Temporary Note". This note contains the value of the field in a structured format. Once the chart has been opened, the Ocean Toolbar will detect and interpret this temporary note and proceed to automatically set the field value in PS Suite directly.
In the case of a custom form that should be populated based on answer to an Ocean eForm, the Ocean Toolbar will detect that a custom form or other form is desired, automatically inserting the custom form into the chart and populating its values.
Some other fields, such as surname, are not updated automatically for safety reasons. However, the Ocean Toolbar can instead automatically send a message ("yellow sticky") to the administrative team to request the field update.
Note: An important side effect of this workaround for PSS's limitations is that the PS Suite user initials recorded for the insertion of these extra notes are recorded as the user opening the chart (i.e. the user to triggered the change), rather than the initial instigator of the change (such as the user who sent the referral or queued the Ocean form). In reality, there is no actual user responsible for the change, but PS Suite's current design enforces that it record something. This has led to some concerns from some users when reviewing "change logs" when the chart-opening user's initials are found.
Fortunately, after consultation with multiple privacy officers across many different PS Suite clinics, this side effect has not been felt to be a significant medico-legal risk, since it is still straightforward to determine conclusively who-did-what when additional scrutiny is required at the database auditing level. Furthermore, the actions recorded in this case are merely mechanical administrative "clean-up" tasks that are determined by earlier clinical entries in the audit logs, rather than clinically-meaningful events themselves. Nonetheless, the issue has been raised with TELUS as part of the wider request to address these API limitations. In the interim, clinics are free to avoid using the Ocean Toolbar in light of this issue. We encourage its use due to the substantial benefits that its integration provides and the widespread acceptance of this behaviour across the PS Suite community.
| EMR Field | Accessible to Ocean | Updatable by Ocean | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Surname | Y | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| First Name | Y | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| Health number province | Y | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| Health number | Y | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| Health number version code | Y | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| Health number expiry date | Y | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| Health number eligibility code | N | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| Preferred method of contact | N | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| Next of kin / Emergency contact | N | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| Emergency contact relationship | N | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| Emergency contact is POA | N | using Ocean Toolbar | |
|
Note: The demographic fields not listed above (phone number etc.) are generally fully supported. |
|||
| Custom forms | N | using Ocean Toolbar | |
| PS Suite messages / tasks / "yellow stickies" | N | N | |
| CPP Field: FH | Y | N | |
| CPP Field: PROB | Y | N | |
| CPP Field: HPH | Y | N | |
| CPP Field: RX | Y | N | |
| CPP Field: ALLR | Y | N | |
| CPP Field: IMMU | Y | N | |
| CPP Field: PERS | Y | N | |
| CPP Field: REMIND | N | N | |
|
CPP Field: RISK
|
Y | using Ocean Toolbar | Recreational drug use cannot be updated directly in the "RISK" CPP field. |
| Balance owing ($) | N | N | Status of the patient's private billing balance, as indicated by the green "$" in the appointment schedule (e.g. an overdue private payment). Since the API does not provide access to any billing-related information for patients, Ocean cannot access this value. |
| Custom vitals (e.g. @MyVital: 123) | N | Y | |
| Core vitals (e.g. BP) | N | Y | |
CognisantMD's Clinical Resource Library resources are designed for use with TELUS PS Suite EMR (PS Suite), unless specified otherwise.
A few small steps are required to import them into your EMR system:
Select the extension the resource file ends with:
This is a custom form file.
Zip files are compressed collections of other files.
This is a flowsheet file.
These files can be imported as either PSS searches or PSS reminders.
PDFs are “portable document files” that be viewed directly by double-clicking the file.
Note: The Ocean custom form may present an error message if it is inserted directly into a patient chart using the "New Custom Form" option in the "Data" menu. To work around this error message, open the Ocean custom form using the "View Form..." menu item (i.e. keyboard shortcut F2).
To load forms into Ocean using the Ocean custom form, a user needs to be able to access the patient's chart with permissions to at least see and enter their own notes (because the Ocean custom form is technically a note in PS Suite).
Most roles have these privileges by default. However, some sites may have restricted their receptionist and data entry clerk role permissions.
To use Ocean, these users need to at least have their "View Privileges" set to "Only Profile, Own Notes and Messages" (to be able to view the Ocean toolbar, Ocean-generated notes, and messages) and their "Action Privileges" set to "Notes" (to be able to edit Ocean notes).
Note: This is only applicable for PS Suite users who are not connected to the TELUS National API. (For those users who are on the API, the initials will match the initials of the user linked to your Ocean Connect or Cloud Connect account, which is typically "OCN")
PS Suite will use the current user's initials with a "/OCN" suffix. For example, if receptionist Bob adds the Ocean custom form, and social worker Sally Smith opens the chart after the patient is done, the note will be added with the initials "SS/OCN".
There is an option in the PS Suite Ocean custom form "Advanced" settings to disable automatic note downloads for online questionnaires. In this case, the above rule would still apply, but now, a user can open the chart without triggering the download for online questionnaires. The user who clicks "Download" will have their initials attached to the note.
PS Suite automatically detects and records vitals typed within free-text chart notes. There are standard vitals and you can also create your own custom vitals. All vitals can be searched, queried in a reminder, graphed, embedded within flowsheets, and/or extracted for research/quality improvement purposes.
Built-in, standard vital tags include: BP, HR, T, Ht, Wt, HC, BMI.
To make a custom vital, put an @ symbol in front of a tag and use the same answer format for that tag. PSS will log anything in this format as a custom vital. For example, @MyCustomVital: OneWordResult. Be careful to watch out for spaces!
Examples of VALID Custom Vitals:
@PHQ-9: 20
@ExerciseMinutesPerWeek: 30
@EmailConsent: Granted
Examples of INVALID Custom Vitals:
VitalWithoutPrecedingTag: 1
@Vital Name With Spaces: 1
@VitalResultWithSpaces: My Result
As part of the email consent process, we have developed a way to easily view email consent status in the patient record in the EMR. The email consent toolbar for TELUS PS Suite allows physicians to see at a glance if a patient has provided email consent. When used with the Ocean email consent questionnaire, the patient status is automatically updated as soon as the patient provides consent. The toolbar can also be used to manually track email consent in PS Suite independent (by selecting the "Grant" or "Deny" options).
You can view a screenshot of the toolbar below. The full toolbar can be downloaded from our Clinical Resource Library and installed into your PS Suite by following the instructions outlined in "Ocean Clinical Resource Installation Instructions". To have the toolbar automatically appear in patient charts, you can create a Reminder Trigger in PS Suite - simply select the Email Consent Toolbar rather than the Ocean Toolbar when choosing the custom form to be triggered.
If a specific user has "Data Entries Require Review" selected in their PS Suite user settings, any notes they write will get blue barred and assigned to their supervising doctor for review. This would include Ocean notes, if that user happens to be the first one to enter a patient chart when an Ocean note is ready to download. As the user's initials are getting tied to the downloaded Ocean note, the note gets blue barred and sent to their supervising doctor for review.
Follow the steps below to prevent these blue-barred notes from downloading when a user with this "needs review" setting enters a patient chart.
If you are downloading clinical tools (e.g. PS Suite Custom Forms) from the CognisantMD Clinical Resource Library and they arrive on your desktop as .zip files, this is due to a quirk in the way certain versions of Internet Explorer download .cfm files.
It's easy to work around this issue:
After a patient completes an Ocean eForm, the resultant clinical note should auto-populate into their chart in PS Suite.
If you find that the notes are not auto-downloading into the patient's chart, you may need to enable the auto-download settings in your Ocean custom form by following the steps below.
There are several options for automatically queuing eForms from PS Suite.
Search in our Clinical Resource Library to download and install the following custom forms in PS Suite:
To learn how to install a custom form in PS Suite once it's been downloaded, please refer to our Ocean Clinical Resource Installation Instructions.
Once imported, you can insert these custom forms into a patient's chart in PS Suite, which will instantly insert the Ocean custom form and queue the corresponding eForms or favourites and then automatically remove itself from the chart.
If you would like to configure the "Ocean - Add Form" custom form to add specific eForms, simply rename it and add the eForm references ("refs") to the name at the end. eForm refs can be found in the eForm's URL when previewing it.
For example, the eForm URL for the PHQ-9 is: https://ocean.cognisantmd.com/questionnaires/preview/QuestionnairePreview.html?ref=phq9; therefore, its eForm ref is "phq9". So, if you wanted to automatically add the PHQ-9, change the form's name to "Ocean - Add Form - phq9". If you'd like to add more than one form, use the pipe ("|") character to separate the multiple eForm references.
If you want to add one of your favourite eForms, called "My Favourite", change the "Ocean - Add Favourite - PHE" form to "Ocean - Add Favourite - My Favourite".
If you would like to be able to add these forms automatically from an Encounter Assistant (EA), add an 'Action' item to the EA to "Insert Form", and point it to your custom form configured above.
It is not recommended that you add custom links to add Ocean eForms to your Ocean Toolbar. Once the Ocean Toolbar has been installed and activated, any custom links to Ocean on your toolbar will not be supported. We are constantly improving the Ocean Toolbar and may ask you to upgrade to a newer version of the toolbar at any time, which will overwrite any customizations you have made to your toolbar.
Our Clinical Resource Library contains several downloadable clinical resources, including custom forms.
Once you've downloaded and imported your desired custom form(s) into PS Suite, you can start using them for any of your patients.
Follow the steps below to insert a custom form into a patient's chart.
