How to Manage Patient Allergies

Patient allergies are recorded in the Patient Allergy window, accessed from the Clinical Summary tab.

Open a patient record and navigate to the Clinical Summary tab.
Select the Allergies button on the right-hand side of the screen.

Click New.
Enter allergy details such as Allergy Type, Code, Severity etc.

Enter any relevant Notes about the allergy.
To alert staff when this patient's record is opened, tick the Alert checkbox.
Click Save.

When Alert is ticked, the Alert List dialog opens automatically each time any user opens this patient's record. Click the ... button next to an alert entry to open the full Patient Allergy window for that entry. The alert remains active until manually cleared.

The allergy alert also appears in the bottom-right corner of the patient's Demographics screen. When at least one allergy is recorded, the Allergies button displays a green tick.

The alert only works for coded allergies

The record-open alert needs the allergy to have an Allergy Code selected from the drop-down. If you tick Alert on an allergy that only has free-text details and no code, HealthTrack shows an error message. The allergy itself is still saved, but no alert will appear when the record is opened.

The Code list comes from your practice-wide allergen list. Access it via: Admin > Allergy Definition Manager.

If the allergen you need is missing, a user with the AllergyDefinition_Modify permission can add it in the Allergy Definition Manager before the allergy is recorded.

A patient who has been asked and confirmed to have no allergies looks the same as a patient who has never been asked. When reading the Clinical Summary, treat a missing tick as "no allergies recorded", not as "confirmed no allergies".

Allergies and prescribing safety checks

At practices where the MIMS drug database integration is enabled, recorded allergies feed drug-allergy safety checks when a prescription is created. Three things affect whether a warning appears:

Only coded allergies are checked. A free-text allergy with no Code is never matched against prescribed drugs, no matter how it is worded.
Each coded allergen must also be mapped to the MIMS database. If the patient has coded allergies that are not mapped, HealthTrack warns the prescriber that those allergies "will not be used when checking for possible drug interactions", with Map Allergies and Continue options. The warning can be dismissed; it does not block prescribing.

Free-text allergies are invisible to prescribing safety checks. If an allergy matters clinically, record it with a coded allergen.

Marking an allergy as no longer current does not remove it from prescribing checks. Inactive allergies still trigger drug-allergy warnings at prescribe time.