Affiliations

Affiliations allow users to group patients and providers together, both for easier user administration, and as a mechanism to pull specialized queries out of the client database. For brevity, this document describes provider affiliations, but patient affiliations work exactly the same way.

Affiliations consist of a namespace and name, a cluster namespace and name, and a list of providers, each with a start (entered affiliation) and end (left affiliation) date. Dates from 1900 or 2049, or thereabouts, can be used as placeholders for “since forever” and “through present.”

Import and Export

Affiliations can be imported from a spreadsheet by copying and pasting into the import dialog box. The import can be used to seed a new affiliation or to append to an existing affiliation. The import process is capable of parsing most common date formats.

Affiliations can also be exported to a CSV file.

Programmatic Import of Affiliation Data

If users with database privileges want to populate affiliation data from a query, they can add rows into the mi_aa_005 (patient) and mi_aa_007 (provider) tables. If the data is repopulated on a schedule, setting is_user_edit_allowed to 0 is typically a good idea as doing so will disallow editing of those rows through the web interface and signal to the user that no edits are allowed. All data entered through the web interface is always considered editable.

Overlapping Affiliation Warnings

If two different affiliation rows for the same provider name and affiliation ever have an overlap in their dates, these overlapping affiliations will be noted in a warning panel at the top of the screen.

Logging and Recovery

Each change to an affiliation, whether to its defining fields or its constituent values, is logged. Users can see the entire history of the affiliation and can recover the affiliation back to any previously saved point.

Use in User Management

Affiliations provide an important role in calculating attribution fields, as explained in the case level visibility documentation.

Use in Measure Workshop

A variety of patterns in Measure Workshop make use of profiled affiliations. For example, Measure Workshop can filter results based on “Is Provider Affiliation Active,” or calculate a “Name of Active Patient Affiliation.” Such measures will consult the affiliation data at the moment of report run or ELT.