Ship between sites and to patients' homes

How a health system sends supplies and documents between its own sites, ships to patients' homes with their details protected, and has shipments from some sites protected automatically.

With Industry set to Healthcare under Manage, Settings, screens speak of sites grouped into regions, a person's home site, and Facility for your own places in the address book.

Ship to another of your sites

Most shipments between sites, such as supplies, equipment and IT hardware, carry no patient information, and nothing about them is masked.

1. Open Quick Ship or Power Ship from the Ship menu.
2. In the recipient search, type the site's name or its site code. Your own sites come up from the organization's address book, so nobody types the address.
3. Choose the service and create the shipment as usual. See Create a shipment and print the label.

If you work at more than one site, check which site the shipment is from before you create it: the label, the pickup and the charge follow it. My shipping locations under My Account lists the sites you may ship from.

Documents that must be signed for

An administrator can require a signature on a package type, for example the envelope used for medical records, or for every outbound shipment from a site or region. The shipper can ask for more, never less. If the chosen service cannot collect a signature, the shipment stops before anything is created and the form names the services that can.

Ship to a patient's home

1. Save the address once: in Address Book, choose New Address, fill it in, and tick Residential address and Patient address. The entry is shown masked in the book from then on.
2. Ship to it as usual. A shipment to a Patient address entry is marked Contains patient information automatically.
3. For a one-off address, tick Contains patient information under Contents on the ship form.

The mark is never printed on the label and never sent to the carrier. In lists, reports and emails the patient appears as initials, city, state and ZIP. How to show the full details, and why a reason is asked, is in Patient privacy settings.

What is protected automatically

• Patient items. Items in the content catalog marked as a patient item, such as a discharge packet or a home infusion kit, protect any shipment they are on. People who manage privacy maintain them under Insights, Patient Items. That page and Privacy settings need the right to manage privacy settings, so not every administrator sees them.
• Whole sites. An administrator can turn on Flag every shipment made here for the organization on Privacy settings, or for one part of it under Unit Settings, for example a specialty pharmacy or home care office whose shipments almost all go to patients.
• Afterwards. Anyone who can work on a shipment can add protection later, with no reason needed. On History, select shipments and choose Mark as patient information.

Keep patient details out of free text

References and notes warn, or block if your organization chooses, when the text looks like a medical record number, a Social Security number, a date of birth or a diagnosis code. A tracking or shipment number is enough to find a shipment later.

Packages coming in

If your organization uses the Mailroom, packages arriving at a site are logged and handed over under Operations, Mailroom, and a return label you sent out is marked received when its package is logged.