Problem overview notes provide a high-level summary of key attributes of health conditions that any clinician might need to be aware of. They are stored at a patient level, and so are available in all care contexts (e.g., inpatient, emergency, outpatient, community). Only one overview can be associated with a specific health problem, and so overviews are jointly maintained by all prescribers.
While clinicians can populate overviews with whatever information serves their needs, standardized overviews work best for major chronic illnesses. Connect Care offers a growing number of provincially endorsed chronic disease overview templates. Each uses a standard format, easy-to-read prose, and interactive text for quick edits to structured data.
Getting started with standardized problem overviews involves three steps:
- Make sure that a problem related to chronic disease management is entered in the patient's problem list.
- Prime the problem overview edit box with interactive text.
- Position the cursor in the problem overview edit box and start typing ".OVER", which will prime a pop-up list of available overview SmartLinks.
- Select an appropriate problem overview SmartLink (e.g., ".OVERVIEWCOVID").
- Interact with the new text block by clicking (selecting) any dark blue text to bring up a pop-up for editing structured data.
- Enter or edit any of the available data, then accept/save the pop-up form.
- Use the refresh button to update the problem overview text.
