Auditing Copying and Pasting Overview

In an effort to improve clinical documentation, CPRS now enables individuals designated by medical centers to review clinical documents to audit how much text within them has been copied and pasted from another document.

Note:   This feature is new with CPRS GUI v31b and patch TIU*1.0*290. Only documents created after the installation of these patches will have copied and pasted text tracked.

Excessive copying and pasting has at least these impacts on healthcare:

 

To help sites better audit what text is copied and pasted into clinical documents, CPRS defines

 

Who Can View Pasted Text?

After signature, only individuals assigned to specific user classes will be able to view text that has been copied and pasted. With CPRS v31b, users in these User Classes are assigned to be able to audit copying and pasting by default:

In addition, sites can give other user classes the ability to view copy/paste data.

 

What Constitutes Tracked Paste?

If a user pastes text into a clinical document within CPRS, CPRS will track that as a paste if it meets several criteria. When a user copies information within VistA or CPRS, CPRS will store characteristics about the copied text if it is available, such as the title and author of the document it came from, or whatever information it can about the source. The information gathered when text is copied can then be displayed if the text is pasted.

If text is copied from outside of CPRS or it is altered after being pasted into CPRS, the source information may simply read “Outside of current CPRS tracking”, meaning that CPRS does not know where it came from.

 

Character Limits for Pasted Text

A 20,000 character limit is hard-coded. If a paste exceeds 20,000 characters, CPRS will not try to track the source. It will still show on the report and the percentage will be calculated as discussed below. The text will still be tracked, but it will not be able to track the source.

 

Other Copy/Paste Characteristics that Sites Can Set

There are several criteria that determine whether a copy and paste will be tracked or displayed with identifying marks in CPRS. Sites have some control over how these criteria are set. The criteria are as follows:

Clinical Application Coordinators (CACs) set the values for these parameters.

 

When Text Will Not Display as Pasted

In addition to these parameters, certain actions will determine whether pasted text displays in CPRS with its identifiers.

Related topics

Progress Notes

Setting How Pasted Text Will Display to Auditors, Authors, and Cosigners