LAST UPDATED JANUARY 17, 2023. Content will evolve as Connect Care is launched across the province, and 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. 

Practitioners using Connect Care as a legal record of care will have their default communication delivery method set to In Basket. This has important implications for note routing when Connect Care is used to determine delivery location. For mixed-context practitioners, notes will be available in Epic and some notes will also be available to the authoring practitioner and primary care provider in their community EMR via eDelivery. The practitioner will receive all such notes at the default eDelivery location, even though they may see patients at more than one community-based clinic. 

It is not currently possible to courtesy copy (cc) 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 default location and default communication method in Epic (In Basket for mixed-context practitioners). The author can specifically choose another location or method to send the letter, like mail or fax. Letters created using a "Shared Externally" template will typically be delivered via eDelivery to the PCP identified at registration, whether or not the PCP is explicitly selected as a recipient. 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

Mixed Context Delivery of Documents

Additional Resources and Notes (click to expand/collapse)

Additional Resources

Notes