Activities

Activities are the tasks performed by users of the PTS 5 System. Most of the activities will relate to prescriptions, but it is possible to capture non-prescription related activities if desired. Clinical Check, Dispensing, Final Check and Break/Lunch are all examples of activities. Collection and Delivery are not activities and should not be set up as such (they are "collection statuses").

Activities are typically recorded with barcode scanners but can be recorded on-screen too.

The activities setup page is where you define the activity system-wide. If you are looking to modify the scanning sequence for a prescription type, you should go to the prescription types setup page.

Accessing the setup page

The PTS sidebar with Setup selected.

Like many of the different PTS utilities, setup is found in the left-hand side bar.

Hover over the sidebar with the mouse cursor and the side bar will expand. Select Setup to reveal a drop-down list of the various setup pages you have permission to access.

To choose a setup page click on its name in the list to be taken to the setup page.

PTS 5 is the most user configurable version of our Prescription Tracking System to date. As a result parts of this Wiki assumes that the reader has permission to access the elements of the system in question. If you don't see specific items and utilities where they are supposed to be you may not have permission to access them.

Adding new activities

To create a new activity access the actions menu by clicking on the actions menu icon at the top right of the page, then from the actions menu click the New Activity button.

Click OK when you're done. The process then continues in the activity popup.

Editing existing activities

To edit an existing activity, select the activity you wish to amend by clicking on its entry in the list to load the activity popup (note clicking the tickbox has another dedicated function).

Activity popup

The activity popup appears after adding a new activity, or clicking on an activity in the list to edit it.

Enter the following information and click the Save button to finish creating or editing the activity. Some fields may be optional.

Activity details tab

The activity popup.

• Description
  A short but descriptive name for the activity, e.g. Clinical Check, Label Production, etc.
• Prescription related
  This defines whether the activity is expected to relate to a prescription. By its nature most activities in PTS are prescription related but there are exceptions, such as Break/Lunch, Administrative Tasks, End of Shift and so on.
• Colour
  Select a colour for the activity. The colour is used on certain reports and user views that have been set up to colour code prescriptions by the current activity (as opposed to the default Red/Amber/Green progress bars).
• Instant
  Instant activities are those activities that are deemed complete as soon as they are recorded, and no time will be allocated against it as an individual entity. You can think of instant activities as simply recording a timestamp in the timeline.
• Elapsed mins. target
  Here you can specify a target time for the activity. Certain activity reports can be configured to use this value to determine if an individual activity was within its target time or not. This is not used frequently; typically users are mostly concerned with the target times of prescriptions as a whole.
• Order on charts
  This is the order this activity appears on the radar chart on the home page where displayed. Setting this to -1 will hide the Activity on the home page radar chart.
• 

  The roles tab.
  Allow errors
  This allows the activity to be identified as a place an error was made. This ensures the activity appears on the error barcode sheet and on the editing screen to record errors.

Instant activity examples

1. Booking In
   A firm example of an instant activity is booking in, which is recorded automatically by the booking-in screen. As soon as the booking in screen is filled in the activity is timestamped at the start of the prescription timeline, and the prescription moves to "waiting for" the next activity, as by this point, the actual booking in process has already concluded.
2. Prescription complete / Final check complete
   It's not uncommon to add an instant activity to the end of the prescription type's scanning sequence to allow for a clear signal that the prescription can be considered complete. While not a necessity, many users prefer the unambiguity of a firm stopping point.
3. End of Shift
   End of Shift should be an instant activity; as above it makes little sense to track the time after the end of an activity.
4. Sent to manufacturing unit / Received from manufacturing unit
   Activities such as this should be instant as you should only be interested in the timestamp. The time in between will automatically be captured as a "waiting" period by the system, and accruing time on the "sent to" and "received from" activities could muddle the data.
5. Other retroactive activities
   You may have noticed that some of the examples already given are based on processes where the activity is recorded retroactively. PTS is unable to calculate durations retroactively, so this concept works much better with instant activities.

Roles tab

The roles tab allows you to limit who can perform each activity.

Click the Add button and then choose a role to add it to the list. To remove a role, click the Delete button next to the role you want to remove.

If you do not specify any roles at all in the roles tab then all roles will be permitted to record the activity. It's not necessary to add every individual role to the list in order to make the activity available to everybody.

Printing activity barcodes

To begin, select the activities for which you want to generate barcodes by ticking the tick box to the left of their entries in the list. You can select multiple activities at once. Once you've done so the Actions Menu will slide in from the right-hand side of the webpage.

Click on the Print Barcodes button and the available printers will be listed, along with the option to print a QR code for use exclusively with 2D barcode readers.

Click on the printer you want to use and the barcode label will be printed. If you chose Browser Printing then your web browser will handle the print job as opposed to PTS and a print preview will be displayed along with the option to choose an attached printer.

Available barcodes

• Activity
  Will record the activity for the current user and prescription.