Searching for Restricted Studies

In some situations, your access to certain patient studies may be restricted. This can occur, for example, when you are treating a patient but you are not the patient’s referring physician. As one of the patient’s physicians, however, you still need to review the patient’s studies. To override this restriction, you can break the glass to grant yourself access to the patient’s studies.

When you grant yourself access to a patient’s studies, you have access to only those studies that were performed on or before the date you broke the glass. You will not have access to any new studies that were performed after you broke the glass. To access these new studies you will need to break the glass again.

Once you have broken the glass for a patient, you do not have to break the glass subsequently to access the patient’s studies. For example, if you break the glass, and then close the patient studies only to return later, you will not have to break the glass again to re-open the study.

Your PACS administrator monitors access to restricted studies. The IntelePACS creates an audit trail to monitor such access. This ensures appropriate access to studies.

To use this feature, ask your PACS administrator to enable the necessary privileges in your user account.

To search for a restricted study:

  1. In the Search tab, click Break-Glass Access.

    The Break-Glass confidentiality agreement appears.

    Break Glass Access button

  2. To accept the terms of the confidentiality agreement, click the check box.

  3. Do one of the following:

    • Type the full patient ID.
    • Type the comma-separated full patient name and the full patient date of birth. For example, type the following: Jones, John and 19740601.

    To search by patient name and patient date of birth, your user account must be assigned the necessary privileges. For more information, contact your PACS administrator.

  4. Click Search or press Enter.

    The patient name, sex and age appear. This allows you to make sure this is in fact the patient for whom you are searching.

  5. If this is your patient, click Access Patient Studies. Click Cancel if this is not the patient for whom you are searching.

    The patient’s studies appear.