Content in this section will evolve as optimizations are made to the system. Please also note that the delivery information on these pages applies to mixed-context practitioners only, and in the majority of circumstances, but some exceptions may not be reflected here.

Delivery of Hospital and Outpatient Care Documents: Clinical Care Notes and Letters

The documents discussed in this section are typically created in Connect Care/Epic to support patient care, when the patient is being cared for at an Alberta Health Services (AHS) emergency, inpatient or outpatient facility. For these documents, there often is no explicit activity on the part of any practitioners to send this documentation to themselves or another practitioner. To allow for continuity of care, these documents are used by community practitioners in real time to provide care in existing patient relationships. These documents may also be used by the AHS practitioner when they see the patient in a community context. 

For mixed-context practitioners, notes will be available in Connect Care and some notes will also be routed to the default EMR of the authoring practitioner and primary care provider (PCP). (Note: In early 2025, this will change - will sent to the location the PCP sees the patient by eDelivery or fax, depending on the delivery method for that location.) 

• List: Note Type Definitions

It is not currently possible to courtesy copy (cc) or forward these notes from Connect Care to other practitioners' EMRs by eDelivery. Notes can be routed within Epic to additional recipients after creation by In Basket, mail or fax (not eDelivery). To send information contained in a note to another care practitioner, the author may also create a letter using the Epic "Communications" activity; to reduce duplicate charting, the note can be linked/added into the contents of the letter. 

Letters are, by default, sent to the recipient’s primary/default location and default communication method. The author can specifically choose another location or method to send the letter. Practitioners should explicitly include the PCP as a recipient if they want the letter to go to them; some templates (e.g., "Shared Externally" templates) include the PCP by default, and they should be added/removed as appropriate. All other recipients need to be added using the Communications activity; commonly used recipients can be quickly selected from the recipient button list. Receipt of the letter via eDelivery requires the recipient to have a conformed EMR (an EMR that is capable of receiving letters and has completed testing/validation) and a default delivery location established for the receiving provider.

The table below reviews some of the ways that Connect Care is currently able to make these documents available to AHS practitioners and to practitioners in the community.

Documents created as part of clinical workflow in Connect Care/Epic