Bereavement Professional

We use Brightree (since 9/2017), but have not fully stepped into using the community aspect of it. I hope to get there in 2020. As far as I know, we do not pay any extra to use the community side of things (or maybe we did at setup?). The rest of Brightree is good, but not perfect. It is nice to have something when many EMRs do not include a bereavement system at all, but I do find that I have to workaround some issues. Sometimes there are duplicates in the mailings that I need to go through and manually remove. I also had to find a way to show that we are doing bereavement calls as a 'mailing' for surveyors. Our volunteers are not setup in Brightree, so I have to upload completed calls to each patient file.My biggest complaint is that there is not a way to designate if a family member wants to be called. There is a place to indicate if they want mailings, but not phone calls. Its an all or nothing issue that I have had to make significant work-arounds. We also send out a soft recruitment letter at the 16 month mark, but Brightree only allows 13 months of mailings, so I have to print and store those letters for a couple of months. It is all reasonable once you have the system down, but it did take a lot of brainpower (and Advil) to get there.  I do find it easy to chart active bereavement sessions and after getting used to the Risk Assessments, the staff find those easy to complete as well. For us, clinical staff are on ipads and office staff have laptops. I have to have both because visits can only be charted on the ipad but reports and closing files can only be done on a laptop. I agree though that any issues are not a high priority because we are bereavement. I have had issues before that I never get responses on.