SISMAUS
en

Patient Journey

HCE tracks a patient from the moment they arrive at the hospital through discharge and into longitudinal follow-up. Every step is part of the same clinical record.

1. Registration

When a patient arrives, they are registered with:

  • National identity document (when applicable)
  • Demographic information
  • Emergency contact
  • Family relationships

For patients without a national ID (typically minors), HCE supports composite identification based on parent names and date of birth.

2. Triage (for emergency arrivals)

Emergency patients are classified by urgency. The classification drives routing — from immediate resuscitation for life-threatening cases through to scheduled outpatient care for routine needs.

Triage captures:

  • Vital signs
  • Chief complaint and current symptoms
  • Allergies and current medications
  • Relevant background
  • A destination decision: resuscitation area, emergency department, hospitalization, or outpatient referral

3. Consultation

The clinical encounter itself. Consultations can be:

  • Emergency — acute care in the emergency department
  • Outpatient (COEX) — scheduled specialist visit
  • Follow-up — continuation of an existing treatment plan

During the consultation, the physician can:

  • Document the encounter in structured notes
  • Order laboratory tests and imaging studies
  • Prescribe medications
  • Request a surgical consultation
  • Request an AI second opinion (see AI Clinical Support)
  • Refer the patient for admission

4. Orders

From a consultation, the physician can generate orders that flow to the appropriate module:

  • Lab orders go to the laboratory module and through the analyzer integration
  • Imaging orders go to the radiology worklist for technicians and radiologists
  • Medication orders become prescriptions that are filled by pharmacy
  • Supply requests for procedures or bedding medications route to pharmacy and warehouse

Every order carries a priority (routine, urgent, STAT) and is tracked through to completion. Critical results trigger automatic notifications to the ordering physician.

5. Hospitalization (for admitted patients)

When a patient is admitted to inpatient care:

  • A bed is assigned (or reassigned during the stay)
  • Nurses record vital signs and nursing notes
  • Doctors record evolution notes on rounds
  • Medications are administered and tracked
  • Supplies consumed are charged against the admission

Hospital administrators see real-time occupancy, transfers, and patient status at the nursing station console.

6. Surgery (when applicable)

The surgical workflow runs alongside hospitalization for patients who require procedures:

  • The surgeon submits the procedure request
  • The surgical committee reviews and approves
  • Scheduling finds an operating room slot and assembles the team
  • Supply requests batch the materials needed
  • Intraoperative tracking captures timing, anesthesia, and staff
  • The surgeon writes the operative note

7. Discharge

Discharge can be standard (recovery), against medical advice, transfer to another facility, or unfortunately, deceased. The discharge record captures the outcome and closes the admission.

Before an admission is considered complete for reporting purposes, it must be:

  • Reconciled — clinical audit confirms the record is complete
  • Coded — an authorized coder assigns the final diagnostic code

8. Reporting

Operational data flows into:

  • Regulatory reports (SIGSA 3H / 7 / 8 for Guatemala's MSPAS) generated from admissions, discharges, surgeries, and causes of death
  • Situational room dashboards for real-time public health monitoring
  • Institutional analytics for hospital administrators (occupancy, length of stay, procedure volumes, outcomes)

Full-record follow-up

The patient's record persists across all their encounters. On any future visit, the complete history is available — pathological, obstetric, family, vaccination, prior admissions, and any previous AI analyses.

Clinical Discovery lets clinicians search across all clinical text (notes, impressions, summaries) using accent- and synonym-aware fuzzy matching, so similar prior cases surface quickly even when terminology varies.