ICANotes Releases Enhanced Functionality for Inpatient Mental Health Records

ICANotes, the leader in web-based mental health records, has announced the availability of program enhancements designed specifically for hospitals and other inpatient mental health facilities. These enhancements include:

●      Clinician Reminder Sheet – A new dashboard screen lists documents due or overdue as well as documents which are incomplete or have not been electronically signed. The amount of time a clinician has to make required notes can be set by each facility.

●      Electronic Medication Administration Record (eMAR) – The eMAR offers a complete electronic workflow to help ensure enhanced nursing efficiency, medication charting accuracy, and safe medication management

●      Clinician’s Orders – The Clinical Order Sheet section has been expanded to include all kinds of orders used by inpatient settings including a variety of detox protocols, activity and restriction orders, and dietary orders. Nurses are alerted when a new order has been written.

●      Verbal Orders – Nurses can write verbal orders and alert the physician to electronically sign them. The order sheet tracks who gave the verbal order, who received it, and who signed it.

●      Initial Evaluations - Initial or Complete Assessments by different disciplines can be designed so that the parts of the evaluation that should be completed by that discipline are highlighted. Each individual facility has the option to determine what portions of the Initial Examination their individual clinicians need to complete. This allows ICANotes to help any facility meet documentation needs specific to their type of inpatient practice and to address documentation requirements mandated by their organization or various surveying agencies.

●      Treatment Plans - A clinical reminder can now be set to remind the clinician when the next Treatment Plan is due. Individual clinicians can each add information to the Treatment Plan, and the completed Comprehensive Treatment Plan may then be saved as a clinical note and e-signed by each clinician.

Designed by a clinical psychiatrist, ICANotes was first introduced in 1999. Since that time, ICANotes has continually expanded its system capabilities and functionality to maximize its usefulness for all clinicians working in behavioral health. Based on a rapid development platform, ICANotes releases program updates weekly. The program design is carefully controlled by the company’s founder and clinical director, Richard Morgenstern, MD, a psychiatrist who understands how clinicians work.  The result is an intuitive EHR that requires very little training.

"We are seeing rapid adoption of ICANotes by inpatient settings where a program must meet the needs of multiple clinical  disciplines and must be capable of helping the clinician quickly create detailed yet individualized notes” said Dr. Morgenstern. “We owe a great deal to our users, who have been generous with their feedback and suggestions. We have worked closely with several facilities to develop and test the new functionality targeted at simplifying and facilitating workflow for the inpatient setting.”

Normal ICANotes Security Settings

Anyone in a group can access a chart, look at the face of a chart, and go to a finished note and read it...just as would be possible with a paper chart in a filing cabinet.

Anyone can make a new note and electronically sign it.

Only assigned providers can go to a note made by somebody else and electronically sign it (i.e., co-sign it).

Anybody can assign themself to a case.

The Principal Provider is just a clinical title, suggesting who you might want to talk to about the care of this patient when notes have been made in the chart by a number of different clinicians.

Only a Supervisor (assigned in the Documents and Settings section of the program) can enter the work area of another clinician, make changes, and re-compile the note. The name at the bottom of the note will always be the person compiling the note.

New Features for Dietitians and Eating Disorders

A number of enhancements have been made to ICANotes for use by dietitians and for those working with patients with eating disorders. They are as follows:

1. There is now a work area for dietitians. It can be reached from the chart face, center bottom, "Dietitian's Note".

This work area contains sections regarding the patient's current weight and BMI, the patient's current diet, and notes regarding the patient's meal behavior, response to the program, goals, and mental status.

The finished note is titled a Dietitian's Note on the Chart Face.

2. There are now sections of the program where the patient's intake of food, behavior during meals and fluid intake and output can be entered. It is anticipated that these factors will be entered by technical staff, rather than by nurses or dietitians, although any discipline can, of course, use these new work sections.

These new sections are entered from the Behavior buttons, which are both on the work areas Progress Note, Prescriber and Progress Note, Non Prescriber. Once in the Behavior sections (there are two, one for In Patients and one for out Patients), there is a section called "Dietary Intake" with a See List button. The See List is a shrub where information about the patient's behavior during meals, the amount and type of food and calories eaten, and fluid intake and output can be entered.

Your suggestions regarding refinement or enhancements to these new work areas are, of course, welcome. Also, if you have any questions about how to use these new features please feel free to contact us.

The ICANotes Team

866-847-3590

support@icanotes.com