Practitioner Account Creation/Maintenance
This article covers how to create a practitioner account in Avatar. Practitioner accounts are necessary for clinicians to record progress notes, create treatment plans and perform certain assessments among other functions. Practitioner accounts are also necessary for MDs to be selected as the Attending Practitioner upon client Admission, which is especially important for some inpatient acute programs.
This guide will cover three forms/reports within Avatar:
- Practitioner Enrollment
- Practitioner Termination
- Telecare Practitioner Report
This guide assumes that the user's main purpose is to set up a practitioner account for linking to the user's regular Avatar account for the purpose of inputting clinical data. The link is furnished by IT during the creation of the user's regular Avatar account, meaning the practitioner account should be created by the submission of new staff's UAR in order to avoid a bottleneck in the user obtaining login credentials for Avatar. If the practitioner account isn't yet created upon creation of the user's regular Avatar account, login credentials will not be sent and you will be prompted to create the practitioner account so the setup may be completed and staff will have full use of the system upon obtaining login credentials.
Setting Up a Practitioner (Practitioner Enrollment)
- Launch Practitioner Enrollment form either from your My Forms widget, or alternately search for the form in your Form Search
- In the search field, type in the name of the practitioner to initiate a search (lastname,firstname format, no spaces after the comma)
- To view or edit an existing practitioner account, choose the practitioner and hit Select. For new practitioners, hit New Staff
Once the form has launched, of the six sections of the form shown on the left side of the screenshot you will only need to enter information for the two sections outlined in red. Please note that while Avatar only requires you to enter information in the red, required fields before submitting, there are a few very important non-required fields, one of which is critical for the practitioner to complete progress notes, the others which may be important for billing/claim or audit purposes.
- Name - should be in format: LASTNAME,FIRSTNAME (again, no space between them, please use full, legal name whenever possible)
- Registration Date - Should match the staff's start date w/ Telecare. Be aware the practitioner will not be able to chart/write progress notes prior to this date. If you are unsure of the exact start date, being "early" is okay.
- Office Address - Zip Code - Type in the zip code of the Telecare program the staff will primarily work from and hit your TAB key; doing so will automatically fill out the next two required fields in Office Address - City and Office Address - State
- Office Telephone (1) - Enter the main phone number of the Telecare program the staff will primarily work from
The next two fields will show as non-required, but as mentioned above are very important:
- NPI Number - this is for the staff's National Provider Identifier number, which can be searched for at: https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/
- When at the NPI Registry website, you do not need to enter information for all fields but to narrow your search results you should at least enter First Name, Last Name and select the State in which the provider is registered. For more common names, entering more information is suggested to narrow results further.
- Both the NPI Number and Taxonomy (found by clicking on the NPI # itself once you have located the provider) are important for some billing scenarios and possibly for auditing purposes. The taxonomy is entered at a later point in the creation of the practitioner account creation.
- Program Association - Please note this field is critical to complete. If the practitioner account is created without an entry in this field, staff attempting to enter a progress note will not be able to complete it. Select all programs for whom the staff member can or may chart.
- NOTE: for programs within the ACT root, you may not have this field and will not need to make a selection here, however, you will still want to use the Program Association form to link your providers to your program for reporting purposes.
After this, move to the Categories/Taxonomy section of the form by making the selection on the left side of the screen.
- Category/Taxonomy - Select "Create New" from the drop-down menu
What you are doing in this section is creating a record of the staff's credentials. Should the staff's credentials change at some point in the future, you would look to end this record and create a new one to reflect the new credentials; please contact your Avatar system administrator should you need assistance with this step. As with the first section, there are a couple of fields that show as non-required but one is critical and the other important, please note them below:
- Effective Date - This should match the date you input on the Registration Date field in the prior section; again, same as the staff's start date w/ Telecare
- End Date - skip this field as it is only needed for when a staff has obtained new credentials/licensure
- Practitioner Category - find a match for the staff's credentials in the drop-down menu. If there is not a match, select "Other" (you may often select "Other" as the list here is not comprehensive and is for billing purposes only)
- Discipline - Select the staff's discipline. Note that all positions aside from MDs, RNs and NPs will fall under the "Psychiatry" selection.
- Practitioner Credentials - As mentioned above, this field is non-required but must be used.
- This field is what controls which credentials will show for the staff in both the client chart within Avatar and on printed clinical documentation (i.e. progress notes, assessments, treatment plans)
- The selections here should be comprehensive; if you do not find an exact match for your staff member, please submit a Help Desk ticket detailing what is missing (please provide acronym of credentials AND the full name, spelled out)
- Multiple selections can be made, and should the staff you are entering have multiple credentials, the order in which you select the credentials will be the order in which they display in the client chart and on printed documentation.
- If you make a mistake, hit the "Clear" button to wipe the entries and start over; the numeric values representing the selected credentials must show in the "Current Order" field, otherwise your selections won't be saved.
- Practitioner Categories For Coverage - find a match for the staff's credentials and check the appropriate box. Like the Practitioner Category field, this list will not be comprehensive and is for billing, so select "Other Mental Health Worker" should you not find an exact match.
- Taxonomy Code - As mentioned earlier in this guide, the taxonomy for the staff member, if one applies for their licensure, can be found on the NPI Registry website: https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/
- This is a lookup field, meaning a search must be initiated and a selection made. Best practice is usually to simply copy the taxonomy code (w/o the description) and paste it into the field; this should bring up a matching search result which then can be selected to populate the field.
The final step is to save this practitioner record prior to hitting the Submit button. Click the "Add Practitioner Categories" button located towards the left underneath the data entry fields.
Avatar will then show a message indicating the saving of the record was successful:
Note: if you are creating a practitioner for a Telecare program in LA County, the process to add that information in Avatar is here Avatar Practitioner Creation - LA County specific. If not, then continue to the next step.
After this, click "OK" and then hit "Submit," after which you will be sent back to your Home View.
Terminating a Practitioner
While the Help Desk handles the deactivation of a user's e-mail, network and regular Avatar account, the programs are responsible for terminating a staff's practitioner account.
- Launch the Practitioner Termination form from either your My Forms widget or your Form Search.
- Enter the last name of the practitioner you wish to terminate in the Select Staff search. Please take care to verify your selection, then click "Select"
- Enter the Termination Date and, if desired, the Reason For Termination
- Click "Submit" and you will be returned to your Home View
Managing Practitioners
To manage your program's practitioners, there is a report that will display various information on your practitioners including Termination Date, NPI # and which programs the staff member is associated with. You can use this to see if there are practitioners you may have forgotten or need to terminate, as well as see which staff may still need NPI, Taxonomy or other information entered to complete their practitioner account.
- Launch the Telecare Practitioner's Report from your My Forms widget or your Form Search
- Please note there are no required fields to run this report, however, to avoid running the report on all available programs you need to select your program from the "Programs" field.
- The "Practitioner Status" field is also non-required, but again, it's advised to make a selection here to prevent the report form displaying more results than needed. It's advised to select "Active" in order to best manage your practitioners.
- When done, click "Process" to run the report; this may take up to 20-30 seconds in some cases, so please be patient. The remaining fields on the right side are only applicable to LA County programs so can be safely ignored.
After running the report, you can look up individual staff in your Client/Staff widget (using the Staff tab) and launch the Practitioner Enrollment form to edit the staff's record or fill in missing information, or launch Practitioner Termination to terminate the staff.
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