The use of the software is important in several areas (commerce, education, health, among others) as it aims to facilitate the processes during work, bringing not only agility in their actions but also security. Another advantage of the software is that in some cases there is the possibility of verifying who deleted or altered certain data, thus preventing further problems from happening.
Deletions and changes of data are very common, especially in clinics and offices. This is because patient records are updated frequently, in addition to having several appointments, receipts, and payments being recorded at all times. When using software, making these changes becomes much easier, but you have to be careful not to delete something important by mistake.
Before we continue, we need to know: Do you already use medical software to perform your consultations at the clinic? We invite you to get to know Ninsaúde Apolo, online software that can be used on a tablet, smartphone, or in the traditional way, on computers. Learn more on our website apolo.app.
When you have a printed document that is very important, care must be taken to ensure that such document is not erased, dented, or undergoes any other irreversible alteration. In this type of document you also cannot delete information without leaving traces, unless the document itself is deleted. On the other hand, any action performed in software can leave evidence of who performed it, and it is for this and other reasons (which also involve security) that the use of software in clinics is so important.
In clinics where there is a large staff, it is natural that there are many operational failures and that users try to mask these failures. With the use of software, it is easier to find out who committed certain actions, including failures. With the medical software Ninsaúde Apolo, for example, one of the possibilities is to verify when a user made a change in the patient's registration form. This action is possible thanks to the logs on the Warnings and Blocks tab.
For example, let's say an important note has been removed from the patient's record, or a phone number has been deleted. Any such change may be discovered. This tab also contains the record of when a user links the output of a product from the stock to the patient's record. See the example below:
Medical scheduling is another place in the system where you can also track changes made by users. In the appointments, there is the possibility to change the status to confirmed, rescheduled, canceled, missing, on hold, and serviced, in addition to being able to enter information about the agreement, forwarder, and service room, among others.
When this information is added (or removed), the system reveals not only which user made the change, but also the date and time. For example, let's say a user removed the insurance from the patient's appointment, or marked as canceled a patient who was confirmed. In these cases, you will be able to find out who authored the changes through the scheduling history.
It is always important to remember that, for the histories to be useful, each person who accesses the system must have a user registration with their login and password, because only in this way is it possible to correctly identify your actions. Despite this, what happens in many clinics is another reality: several people use the same user registration to access the system, thus making it impossible to identify errors.
While some software may indeed limit the number of registered users, it is important to pay attention to this detail when choosing the ideal system for your clinic, because when it comes to managing your team, even this particularity can make a difference. In the Ninsaúde Apolo software, there is no user registration limit, so no matter the size of your clinic, all people who use the software can and must have their login to access it.
Despite so many historic options, there is a nightmare that haunts many managers, which is information exclusion. At Ninsaúde Apolo we follow all the Brazilian rules, as well as the HIPAA rules, that is why it is not possible to delete patient records from patients who have already been treated, for example. Patients who have future appointments cannot have their records deleted either unless the schedule itself is also deleted.
But what if the schedule is deleted, how will we know who deleted it? Because following the logic, since the history of changes and deletions would be in the schedule itself, excluding the schedule, the "evidence of the crime" would also be excluded, right? Wrong!
With that in mind, the developers of Ninsaúde Apolo created the Operations History, where it is possible to track all operations made by users, whatever the system screen. Therefore, any inclusion of information, alteration, and deletion will be present in this history, allowing managers to have greater control over how their team is working. This control can identify not only casual failures but also frequent and intentional errors, helping to find out if an employee is acting in bad faith, for example.
Another case that often occurs is when some information disappears from the system and no one takes the blame. When this occurs, it is quite common for the software itself to be seen as the culprit, as users tend to imagine that information is being erased by some sort of system error. The truth is that these cases are usually great opportunities to use the history of operations because through them the so-called "mysterious disappearance" always ends up being solved.
To demonstrate how Ninsaúde Apolo's history of operations works, let's take as an example what we have already commented on in this article, which is the case for a schedule that has been deleted. To find the exclusion, you must have a period or date as a starting point, and then the user must access the Settings ⚙ menu, Users submenu. Then, on the upper right side of the screen, press the Operations button.
When accessing the operations screen, you must inform the type of resource you are looking for, which in this case will be the Scheduling menu. In the More filters option, enter the date or period in which you believe the deletion took place, and if you prefer, you can also enter the name of one or more users, and that way the system will only list the actions done by them. If you leave the users field empty, the system will list information of all users who took some action in that period. The result will be shown on the screen as in the following example:
As we can see in the image above, the system reveals to us that on the day 02/25/2022 the user Michele Martins performed two deletions, one at 15:42:00 and the other at 15:48:48. For more details on deletion, just click on the icons that are on the right side of the screen, where one of them presents the history of the deleted schedule, including the patient's name and other actions taken before the deletion. If you need more information about the appointment itself, just click on the option "</>", which corresponds to "view object". The other option mentioned before corresponds to "view history". Check out the example:
The View Object option may seem complicated at first because it shows us codes and variables used in system programming. Even so, it is easy to interpret them and gather the necessary information. For example, in the codes shown in this exclusion, we can notice that there is the information of "date", which corresponds to the date the patient was scheduled (which in this case would be the day 03/02/2022). We also have the information "StartTime" and "EndTime", which correspond to the time and duration of the appointment, in this case from 09:00 to 09:20.
Thus, we can conclude that the user Michele Martins on 02/25/2022 deleted an appointment for the patient Vitoria Garcia, which in turn was scheduled for 03/02/2022 at 09:00. The appointment had been entered in the agenda on 02/09/2022 also by the user Michele Martins.
In addition to these tools, Ninsaúde Apolo has many other features that help not only managers in their decision-making, but also the clinic as a whole.
Did you like our tips? Keep following the blog for more articles like this one, and if you still don't use management software to make your calls, come and meet Ninsaúde Apolo.