Letters
When a doctor sees a patient, quite often they write a letter afterwards to a referred/referring doctor. In the case of GPs, it will be a referral to a specialist. Specialists will write back to a referrer (a GP) to update that doctor with their findings.
Standard Letter
Aka Filed Letter or just Letter. This is a letter that has been typed by the practice. They can be accessed from the MPW2000 Accounting Screen or Appointment Book, and the Document Management System (DMS) and Clinical (DHR). These letters are DOC or DOCX files that are created by doing mail merges with MAIN?.DOC template files. These files are stored in the \\SERVER\MEDILINK\LETTERS folder, as well as in DATA\LETTERS.DB (which is just for quick lookups as it only stores the relative path to the letter, not the actual binary data). Can be transmitted via Secure Emessaging from DMS or DHR.
Review Letter
This is just a Standard Letter, but additionally has statuses for typists and doctors to use to review it, and ultimately file it away (make it a Standard Letter). You will notice in MPW2000 that the Review Letters are segregated, however in DMS/DHR they are just all displayed together in a list. Can be transmitted via Secure Emessaging from DMS or DHR.
Other Derived Letter Types
These are derived from the Standard Letter above (stored and viewed and modified in the same way), but come in to the system in a different way.
Medical Objects Referral Letter / ReferralNet Referral Letter
These are stored as Standard Letters, and for all intents and purposes are treated as such. These modules were our early forms of HL7 importing. We don't have many users of these modules, and favour the Results module instead now (the Medical Objects and ReferralNet modules could only parse very specific types of incoming HL7 messages - whereas the Results module can process virtually anything). Can be transmitted via Secure Emessaging from DMS or DHR.
Transcription Letter
This is a letter that has been imported from a Transcription provider like OzeScribe or NTS or Global Transcriptions. For all intents and purposes though, it is stored and displayed like a Standard Letter. Can be transmitted via Secure Emessaging from DMS or DHR.
Other Documents
There are a few other types of documents that can be attached to patients.
Attachments
Aka Scans. These are just any document imported or scanned via the DMS system. They are also displayed in DHR. They reside in \\SERVER\MEDILINK\SCANS. They are also in DATA\PATIENTBLOBS.DB (but this is just used for lookups, it has no binary data, just relative paths to these files). Can *not* be transmitted via Secure Emessaging from DMS or DHR.
Results
These are HL7 files parsed by DHR Results. They are viewable in the DHR and DHR Results (and DMS if they are a HL7 Referral Letter - see Referral Letter section). They are stored as raw HL7 files in the \\SERVER\MEDILINK\DATA\HL7\PROCESSED folder, and each HL7 file has its own subfolder with the extracted payload file(s). These payload files are not necessarily DOC files, they might be plain text, or RTF or PDF (or anything really). There are a few lookup tables for them such as DATA\HL7MESSAGE.DB and HL7OBSERVATION.DB. As for the other types, these lookup tables don't store the binary data, just a relative path reference (the Message Control Id is the filename). Can *not* be transmitted via Secure Emessaging from DMS or DHR.
Referral Letter
These are letters that have come in via HL7 file from other doctors, i.e. they have not been typed by the practice. They are effectively just HL7 Results; see the Results section for the details of where/how they are stored. You will see these listed in the DMS, DHR and DHR Results. Currently they do not show in the MPW2000 Letters screens (so in a way they don’t ‘count’ as a Letter). Can *not* be transmitted via Secure Emessaging from DMS or DHR.