Totalcare + SOGIE, SFCU and Personal Pronouns
Equipoise International is proud to announce that Totalcare 8.2 includes significant enhancements to support SOGIE, SFCU and personal pronouns. These enhancements have been included not just to satisfy emerging legislative or regulatory requirements, but to provide the capability to capture and present sex, gender identity and gender expression in an inclusive, useful and efficient manner.
What do the acronyms SOGIE and SFCU mean?
SOGIE is an acronym for Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression whilst SFCU is an acronym for Sex for Clinical Use.
Why are SOGIE and SFCU important?
Inclusive patient care and communication is an important principle that is gaining increasing awareness in Australian healthcare settings. State Health Authorities have either already instituted the capture and reporting of patient gender as distinct from patient sex or have plans to do so over the coming 12 to 18 months. Professional organizations such as the RACGP have published fact sheets on the collection and recording of information about patient sex, gender, variations of sex characteristics and sexual orientation, and the AMA has published position statements on gender affirming care.
What is changing in Totalcare to support SOGIE, SFCU and inclusive care?
Totalcare 8.2 includes new patient attributes that support the capture of Gender Identity, Gender Expression, Preferred pronouns, Sex for Clinical use, Sex at Birth and Sexual Orientation. These new fields supplement the pre-existing patient sex attribute which is treated now explicitly as the administrative sex.
Screens from Appointments and Admissions to Registration, Tracking and Tasks have been enhanced to display available gender information and, if chosen and applicable, preferred pronouns.
The choices available in the new fields are drawn from a rich data set compiled from International and Australian sources. The choices can be modified or extended by each Totalcare client to meet their needs.
To support standardized interchange of the new patient attributes, Equipoise has mapped selections to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) references sets and/or SNOMED CT Concepts Identifiers.
The Totalcare Document merge engine has been enhanced to support use of the new attributes, including the ability to choose the correct grammatical form of a patient’s preferred pronouns based on context.
What screen changes can I expect when registering a new Patient?
The screenshots below display how the new fields are presented in the Patient Registration screen.
The “Sex (Clinical)” field is used to define the patient’s sex for clinical use. Totalcare Clinicals “Mozart” now displays this information prominently in the patient banner.
The “Identity” and “Expression” fields are used to capture respectively the patient’s gender identity and gender expression.
The “Pronouns” field is used to capture the patient’s preferred pronouns. The selector also includes an option “Name only” to support people whose preferred pronoun is their name.
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The “Birth Sex” fields is used record the sex at birth documented for a patient. Tooltips have been added to selectors to provide information on their intended use. |
There are a lot of new fields, how can I efficiently capture this extra data?
Totalcare 8.2 supports initialisation of the new fields based on preference rules. These rules include, for example, initialisation based on Australian cisgender norms. When enabled, these rules make data entry very quick and efficient for the majority of patients, whilst still enabling variation when applicable.
What if SOGIE, SFCU or Pronouns are not of interest to my practice?
Equipoise recognises that the new Gender and Pronouns fields may not be of interest for some medical practices so whilst they are enabled by default, they can be disabled or hidden by preference.
More information
The Australian Government Guidelines on the Recognition of Sex and Gender can be viewed at https://www.ag.gov.au/rights-and-protections/publications/australian-government-guidelines-recognition-sex-and-gender
The AMA’s (Australian Medical Association’s) Health position statement can be viewed at https://www.ama.com.au/articles/lgbtqiasb-health-position-statement
The RACGP’s (Royal Australian College of General Practitioner’s) fact sheet on collecting and recording information about patient sex, gender, etc can be viewed at https://www.racgp.org.au/FSDEDEV/media/documents/Running%20a%20practice/Practice%20standards/5th%20edition/Collecting-and-recording-information-about-patient-sex-gender.pdf
To find out more about Totalcare 8.2 please contact the Totalcare helpdesk via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., call on 1300 239 477, or log in to the Totalcare support portal.