MassPAT Tutorial #6
Bulk Search (healthcare audience)
Overview: The Bulk Search tutorial, will demonstrate how a Massachusetts healthcare professional or delegate user of MassPAT, the proprietary system called PMP AWARxE, can search on the medical prescription history of multiple patients at the same time. This so-called “bulk patient search” feature can be useful, for example, when a prescriber wants to search a list of patients who are scheduled for appointments the next day and might be prescribed pain medication. Note that a separate MassPAT tutorial that provides general guidance on conducting patient searches touches on how to conduct bulk patient searches, but here it will be covered in more depth. The tutorial will cover providing patient search information both by manual data entry and data file upload.
To begin, we’ll log in as a prescriber user type, since the bulk patient search feature is the same for other healthcare professional user types.
Logging in directs you to your user Dashboard. To navigate to the bulk patient search page, we select Menu in the blue header bar at the top of the screen. This opens menu items, organized by several headings. Under the RxSearch heading, we will select Bulk Patient Search. If you wanted to conduct a search on an individual patient, you would select the Patient Request item.
Okay, let’s go to the Bulk Patient Search page.
Notice that the Bulk Patient Search page presents two approaches: One where you manually enter patient information and then select the green Add button to enter information for each additional patient to be searched. The other approach is to upload a spreadsheet of patient information, run validation on the format of your uploaded file, and then run the bulk search.
With either approach, you need to give a Group Name to your bulk search, so that the system can keep track of it.
As when setting up a search on an individual patient, you have the option to narrow the date range for the search from the default of one year—or include additional states in the search.
Notice too that there’s a tab for Bulk Patient History. Here the system keeps track of your bulk searches so you can retrieve or refresh the search results—and so you can monitor bulk searches conducted by your delegates.
Okay, let’s walk through the manual entry approach for searching on multiple patients at the same time. First we’ll complete the three required patient information fields indicated by a red asterisk: First Name, Last Name, and Date of Birth. As an option, you can refine your search by also inputting the patient’s Zip Code; however, this is not recommended.
After entering information for the first patient, click on the Add button to add that patient to the bulk search request. We’ll do the same thing for a second patient, and then for a third patient. We could add more patients for the bulk search, but for this demonstration we will stop there.
Each time you add a patient, a Remove button appears next to the patient entry. This is in case you change your mind about who to include in the search.
Let’s complete the required fields in the next two sections of the form. First, we’ll give this grouping of patients a unique name so we can find it later in the Bulk Patient History list.
Next, notice that the range for Prescription Fill Dates defaults to 1 year from the current date. That’s because the system only supports searching prescription histories going back a single year. For our demonstration, we’ll leave this as is. If you wish, though, you can narrow the date range for a search.
Finally, notice the PMP Interconnect Search checklist at the bottom of the page. Here’s where you control which additional states to include in your bulk patient search results. The list indicates which states are available to share data. You can check any states you want to include for a particular bulk search.
You also have the option of setting defaults for states to include in all of your patient searches. For instance, you might want to always include neighboring states if they are available. To do that, navigate to the default settings page by selecting your username in the blue header bar, and then selecting the Default PMPi States item in the drop-down menu.
Here on this Default InterConnect PMPs page, check the states you want as your defaults. Then select the Update Defaults button on the right. When you do this, you will see a “Success! Default States Updated” message.
Now you can navigate back to your Patient Request page by selecting Menu on the blue header bar, and then selecting Bulk Patient Search as we did before.
At this point, we could run the search on these three patients by selecting the green Search button at the bottom of the page. Instead, let’s take a step back and look at how to use the File Upload feature rather than Manual Entry for a bulk patient search.
Just a quick note before we look at File Upload. If you are conducting searches as a delegate user authorized under one or more primary account holders, when you select the Search button on this page, the system will prompt you to select which supervisor you are conducting the search on behalf of. That’s not the case for this demonstration, so we will proceed.
Let’s move along and explore File Upload.
For the File Upload approach, you will create a spreadsheet with patient information like that we entered in the Manual Entry form. We recommend that you download and use the formatted sample file available from this page; click on the View Sample File link and save the file locally.
Once you’ve done that, you can populate the spreadsheet based on the column headers, which call for the same required patient data elements as for manual entry: namely, first name, last name, and birth date. The postal code column is optional. If you do not use that column, you must delete the column heading to avoid validation errors. In addition, for an uploaded file to pass validation, date of birth must be in the month, day, year format. If you work in the file using Excel, be sure to save it as a CSV file when prompted about keeping the original format.
For this demonstration, we’ve populated the spreadsheet form with three patients.
Now we’ll select the Choose File button on the Bulk Patient Search page, browse to where we’ve saved the file locally, and select the file to complete the upload. The file name will display in the page’s file upload window.
As a final step for the upload, it is recommended that you run validation on the format of data in the uploaded file. To do this, select the Validate Format button. The system will download a validation results file that you can view to identify any errors.
Our file had no errors. An error would occur, however, if the date of birth were not in the correct format or if required data elements were missing. So, when a row is flagged as having an error, be sure to check all the data in that row. After considering any error flags and making any necessary adjustments, upload the corrected CSV file to the search page.
Let’s complete the rest of the Bulk Patient Search form. We do this the same way we did for Manual Entry. First, we enter a unique Group Name. Then we select the Prescription Fill Dates, which we will keep as the defaults, and finally select any additional states to include in the search.
Having completed the Bulk Patient Search form, let’s click on the green Search button. We’ll see a message indicating that the request validated successfully and we can locate the report on the Bulk Patient History tab. Let’s click on that tab to see our report.
The Bulk Search History page presents a table with one row for each bulk search you’ve conducted. Over time, the table becomes a repository of your current and past bulk patient searches. Be aware that the individual patient search results from bulk searches will also display elsewhere in the system—for instance, in the Request Requests list on your Dashboard.
For now, we see our search listed in the table. Let’s click on the link to view the results.
This page displays a table with summary counts of prescribers, dispensers, and prescriptions written during the specified date range for each patient. If you are a delegate user, your supervisor will also be listed.
We also see the status of the searches for each patient. The status can indicate if the system has not yet finished processing the search, or if the results are incomplete or no prescriptions are found.
When results are ready, we can view patient reports by selecting the row in the table for the patient of interest. Brief information appears in the panel below, where we can choose the View button to access the full report.
Here on the Patient Report page, information about this patient’s prescription history is displayed in three main tabular views—by prescriptions, prescribers, and dispensers—with summary counts of the records in each of these tables near the top of the page. For a more detailed walkthrough of this report, you can view the separate MassPAT Patient Search tutorial.
To view search reports for other patients in your bulk patient search, you can navigate back to Bulk Patient Search, choose the Bulk Patient History tab, and select another patient. Or click on the patient from the Recent Requests table on your Dashboard.
To wrap up, let’s go back to that Dashboard. Again, this is where you have access to searches you’ve recently run, in case you want to go back to the results—by selecting the patient name. Also, if you are a primary account holder—for instance, a prescriber or a pharmacist—that has delegates authorized by you to run searches in the system, their searches will be listed here in a separate table.
Finally, to close out of the system, you must log out. Click on your name in the blue header bar and click on the green Log Out button.
Okay, this concludes our demonstration. You should now be able to run prescription history searches in MassPAT on groups of patients. Should you need assistance in using the system, call the Appriss help desk phone number that appears at the top right of every page of the system.