Follow-up tasks

Care work does not always end when an encounter is completed. Clinical Coordinator or Licensed Clinician can capture a follow-up task for a patient, name the person assigned and record when it is due. The task has a separate status, so the next action can be open, in progress, completed, escalated or cancelled without changing the older encounter’s history.

An assigned clinician sees work owned by that person. The coordinator can see escalated work needing attention, while the completion date helps distinguish work actually finished from a task merely placed in a completed state. The task record is intentionally patient-linked, making it useful across several encounters for the same person. Teams should use its description to explain the concrete action to take.

• Named owner. The assignee points to a staff record, so the next action has a responsible person.
• Due date. The due date gives the team a common basis for prioritizing open work.
• Outcome state. Completion and escalation are separate states, allowing a coordinator to focus on unresolved patient work.

Decide what deserves a task and who can assign it. A task such as arranging a follow-up observation should name the requested action clearly enough for another clinician to understand. Agree on the point at which a task is escalated, who reviews an escalation and when a cancellation is appropriate. The team should also decide how the completion date is entered when the work is finished.

Set a routine for reviewing due work. A task assigned to an inactive or unavailable person needs a new accountable owner. The patient link should be checked before saving, especially where people have similar names. If a task follows a particular visit, put enough context in its description for the clinician to locate the relevant episode without relying on a private side note.

After a visit, the clinician creates a patient task to check a measured observation, sets the due date and assigns it to the person who will perform it. That person sees it in their work list, changes it to in progress and records the completion date when finished. If the observation requires another decision, they mark the task escalated. The coordinator reviews the escalated list and identifies the next responsible clinician while preserving the original task and patient connection.

• My care tasks — See assigned patient work with its due date and state.
• Escalated care tasks — Give the coordinator a focused list of unresolved actions.

Follow follow-up work after encounter review.