The Exam module is a fundamental component of the My Vision Express Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system. It allows you to perform eye examinations and maintain critical patient data relevant to them and it fully integrates with other modules in the application such as Calendar, Patient, Order and Insurance.

The Exam section of Chapter 1, shows you how to go about setting up the exam features of the program. You should look in particular at how to setup the exam templates. These make the examination process more efficient since they allow you to preset the values on most of the exam fields to what they would routinely be in the exams performed at your practice. Another important part of the setup process for exams are the exam categories which are also documented on Chapter 1 on the Categories section. These categories contain the options for most list controls in the exam. You should setup the exam categories before the exam templates.

If you have not purchased the My Vision Express Exam module, you can still use it to perform 500 fully featured exams for evaluation purposes. Once you purchase the module and activate it, the exams that you have performed while evaluating will be kept and the 500 exam limit will be removed.

Exams are opened or started from the Search Exam dialog (File > Exam from the main menu or Exam from the main toolbar). Under the ‘Search Exam’ group box, you will see four radio buttons: ‘History’, ‘Search’, ‘Template’ and ‘Appointments’. The first two allow you to open existing exams and the last two will let you create new ones.

The ‘History’ radio button will display any exams that have been created or opened within today’s calendar date. ‘Search’ shows the results of any searches performed by specifying parameters in the ‘Search Exam’ group box and clicking the Search button. Template will let you select a template for a new exam, after which you will be prompted to specify a patient profile. ‘Appointments’ will let you select from the list of appointments for the doctor currently logged in, after which you will be prompted to specify an exam template. In this last case, the patient profile linked to the appointment will be used for the exam as well.

There are two other ways to get an exam started. Clicking the Add button would prompt you to select a patient record that would be linked to a new full exam. When the ‘History’ radio button is selected and there are exam records for the day, or when the Search radio buttons is selected and there are exam records matching the search criteria specified; you can select one of those exam records and click the ‘Copy’ button to create an exam identical to the original one except for the exam date which will change to the current one and the ‘Refractive’ and ‘Contacts’ tabs that will not copy any prescription.