Affected users: Primarily MOAs and administrative staff who manage patient demographics, as well as any clinician needing to quickly locate emergency contacts.
Task affected: Patient File module — Relations section. Specifically, the display order of the emergency contacts, family members or caregivers linked to a patient's chart.
Impact: Critical safety risk during urgent situations, occurring occasionally. Because contacts are forced into alphabetical order by default, the primary emergency contact or decision-maker can end up buried in the middle or bottom of a long list, increasing the risk of calling the wrong person during a medical emergency.
Current state: It is currently impossible to reorder the contacts, and deleting and re-entering them does not bypass the default alphabetical sort. As a workaround, users must create a separate, manual memo in the patient's file to specify who the primary contact is, which is inefficient and clutters the chart.
Competition consideration: N/A