best practice 13, May 2008: Creating a cardiovascular risk assessment alert

Ten Minute Tutorial

Essentials

10 minute tutorial
Snippets Varenicline and suicidal behaviour. Wider access to quit cards. The lung age of smokers. Lung age calculator.
Correspondence: Your feedback; dexamethasone for otitis externa, ECG for lithium users.
Issue 13 Contents

Full colour PDF of the pages as they appeared in ‘best practice’.

Creating a cardiovascular risk assessment alert

Ideally cardiovascular risk should be assessed in all men aged over 45 years and all women aged over 55 years. Māori have an earlier onset of cardiovascular disease and therefore require cardiovascular risk assessment ten years earlier, i.e. Māori men aged 35 years and Māori women aged 45 years.

Current evidence suggests that these guideline recommendations are not being met. This tutorial demonstrates how you can identify all Māori men aged over 35 years who are registered at your practice and add an alert to their patient files to remind you to assess their cardiovascular risk.

1	Step 1: To set up alert for cardiovascular risk assessment From the menu select: Setup > Patient Register > Alert. Put a code, perhaps “CVDR”, in the appropriate box and put “Carry out CVD risk assessment” in the description box. Click OK, your alert is now set up for use.
2	Step 2: To run query to identify Māori men over 35 years Using MedTech simply complete the query builder form as shown on next page; selecting items from the box on the left and transferring them to the appropriate box on the right of the screen. Click run query
3	Step 3: To merge alert to identified patients After running the query click the merge button and select Alerts. Select the alert created in step 1, enter a note if required and tick auto prompt if preferred.

Identifying Māori men aged over 35 years using MedTech 32 Query Builder

To take part in a short audit for 1 CME point please complete the questionaire

Submit a comment about this article