Record Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in a Patient’s Chart

Use PCC’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity components to securely record information in a patient’s chart. When a patient decides their gender identity is public, your practice can optionally display a patient’s pronoun and preferred name in the Appointment Book and elsewhere in PCC EHR.

Watch a Video: You can watch a video guide to these features: Record Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.

Contents

1 Record Sexual Orientation in a Patient’s Chart
2 Record Gender Identity, Preferred Name, and Pronoun in a Patient’s Chart
3 Make a Patient’s Preferred Name and Pronoun Visible On Various Screens in PCC EHR
4 Configure How Your Practice Displays Preferred Name and Pronoun

Record Sexual Orientation in a Patient’s Chart

When your practice charts a patient’s sexual orientation, you can record the patient’s information in the Sexual Orientation component.

Your practice can add this chart-wide component to chart note protocols or anywhere you need it for your workflow.

Sexual Orientation is a Confidential Component: When you open a chart, the contents of this component are hidden. A clinician or other PCC EHR user must click the disclosure arrow to display the contents of the Sexual Orientation component. PCC EHR records that this information was accessed, and your practice can review who accessed the information in the PCC EHR Audit Log.

Record Gender Identity, Preferred Name, and Pronoun in a Patient’s Chart

Use the Gender Identity component to record a patient’s gender identity, preferred name, pronoun, and notes.

The component appears on the Medical Summary by default. Your practice can move it, remove it, and add this chart-wide component to chart note protocols or anywhere you need it for your workflow.

Patient information in this component is marked private by default. When private, the fields in the component are not visible anywhere in PCC EHR except in the Gender Identity component.

Gender Identity is a Confidential Component: When you open a chart, the contents of this component are hidden. A clinician or other PCC EHR user must click the disclosure arrow to display the contents of the Gender Identity component. PCC EHR records whenever this information was accessed, and your practice can review who accessed the information in the PCC EHR Audit Log.

Make a Patient’s Preferred Name and Pronoun Visible On Various Screens in PCC EHR

When a patient’s gender identity information is no longer private, select Public in the “Privacy Status” drop-down menu.

When Public is selected, PCC EHR and pocketPCC can display the patient’s preferred name and pronoun in the Patient Banner as well as in other places in PCC EHR.

On the Appointment Book, for example, your staff will be able to see the patient’s preferred name and pronoun as they make an appointment. The preferred name can also appear on the Schedule screen and PCC EHR queues, except for the Rx Queue (which uses the patient’s legal name) and the E-lab Results queue (where a patient’s name is provided by a lab vendor). Your practice can find the patient by searching for either the preferred or legal name.

The patient’s preferred name can also appear at the top of forms and patient and family-facing reports that include the green name header. This includes the Patient Visit Summary:

Note that the patient’s legal name and sex appear elsewhere on the form. Documents that can include the preferred name in the green header include: Care Plans, PDF versions of Continuity of Care Documents, Growth Charts, the Health Information Summary, Lab Order Details, the Patient Visit Summary, Summary of Care Record, and Visit and Billing History printouts.

Configure How Your Practice Displays Preferred Name and Pronoun

A patient’s preferred name and pronoun do not appear at all if their Gender Identity component is set to Private. Your practice can configure whether PCC EHR displays only a patient’s legal name, only the preferred name, or both the legal and preferred names when they are set to Public in a patient’s chart. You can also optionally turn off the preferred pronoun display.

Open Practice Preferences to review your options.

In addition to adjusting your practice’s display preferences, your practice may wish to change the location of the component. You can also adjust your practice’s existing workflows for patients. For example, if a patient’s preferred name was kept in the Nickname field in Demographics, you can use the Gender Identity component instead.

Other PCC EHR Tools to Support Patients: Some practices use a patient status flag, an entry in the Reminders component, or a Clinical Alert to inform clinical staff when a patient has gender identity information they should be aware of. For example, if a patient shares private information about their gender identity with a clinician, the practice may record that information in the confidential Gender Identity component. A flag and a corresponding Clinical Alert could inform clinical staff that they should review that component prior to the appointment.

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Record Sexual Orientation in a Patient’s Chart

Record Gender Identity, Preferred Name, and Pronoun in a Patient’s Chart

Make a Patient’s Preferred Name and Pronoun Visible On Various Screens in PCC EHR

Configure How Your Practice Displays Preferred Name and Pronoun

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