Contacts: How and Why Should I Add Them?

Adding Contacts will save staff time in their day-to-day use of the EHR and Practice Management systems. Whether you are selecting a Primary Care Physician and/or Referring Physician when scheduling a patient or selecting a lab when placing a pathology order, the Contacts list offers a quick way to populate provider and lab information.

From the Practice Management system, you can add to the Contacts list by clicking on your practice logo in the upper left-hand corner, clicking Practice to expand a dropdown list of options, and selecting Contacts at the bottom.

Click the blue Add New Contact button in the top-right of the page to create a new contact.

Once on the Create New Contact page, you can enter a provider or company's information manually, or you can search in the NPI Database field; just make sure the correct filter for either Persons or Companies is selected. You can search in multiple ways, such as searching by provider name and/or address. If you find that the address that populates is incorrect, this simply means the individual or company has not updated their information in the NPI Database. Users, however, have the ability to overwrite the outdated information and replace it with the most current one. 

From within the Contact Method section, you can open up the drop-down menu to select additional fields you would like to populate, such as email address, fax number, mobile phone, etc.

This is particularly useful for those offices using eFax on the EHR (iPad and iPhone) because when staff members need to fax something to a particular provider or company, they will have easy access to the fax number through the Contacts list.

Lastly, one or multiple addresses can be added or removed from the Address section at the bottom.