Patient Safety Alert: Rare Workflow Utilized Impacting Outbound Fax Queue in Small Percentage of gGastro Instances

This is an important patient safety message regarding a rare workflow used in faxing that, if utilized, can result in a mismatched name in the outbound fax queue of gGastro®. This may be impacting a small percentage of our Modernizing Medicine Gastroenterology clients.

We identified a series of workflow steps (identified below), which can result in mixing of patient documents within the fax queue of gGastro®. Please note:  This is a rare workflow that impacts fewer than .05% of patients and does not impact the display of the documents within the patient chart. Additionally, when this workflow is combined with faxing from the contacts pane of gGastro, it is possible that the fax went to an unintended recipient.  

We plan for this issue to be resolved in the upcoming release of gGastro® v.4.72.1.X, currently planned for release on April 24, 2021 to our gCloud Clients. On-Premise Server clients will need to schedule an upgrade via appointee once available.  Once the fix is available, not only will the update prevent this workflow from mixing documents within the fax queue, but it will also align the historical data within gGastro (with appropriate audit logging.) 

Please be watching for future communications about this technology update and instructions on how to obtain a list of potentially impacted patients, when available.

Please review the workflow below with your staff, in order to avoid this workflow until the 4.72.1.X update has been released, or applied to your environment.

Workflow Steps:

1. User opens patient A’s chart > opens a scanned or imported document >  goes to the edit panel and begins to edit the scanning details.

2. The same user opens patient B’s chart > opens a scanned / imported document > goes to the edit panel and begins to edit the scanning details in the second patients chart.

3. User attempts to fax the document of patient B from the patient’s chart.    
   • The fax becomes incorrectly associated with patient A, instead of patient B.  
   • If the user uses the contacts pane to select a recipient, the recipients listed are for patient A, instead of patient B.
   • This may result in sending patient B’s information to patient A’s contact.

We recommend the following best practice: Save & close (X) the scanned or imported document before opening up another patient’s chart. 

Below:  Viewing a scanned document in the patient chart and editing the properties on the right hand side.

Below:  When faxing the second patient’s document, the contacts and fax recipients that pre-populate on the screen seen below are associated with the incorrect patient.

Modernizing Medicine Gastroenterology is committed to helping deliver the safest care to all of your patients and we apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused your practice. If you have any questions concerning this information, please contact our Support Team.