Enhanced Appointment Scheduling
Booking many Appointment into the Future

Date of Tech Note: 14 May 2000
Enhancement: 14 May 2000
Bug Fix: N/A

Description

For certain types of appointment schedules and clinics, there is the need to be able to quickly book several appointments into the future for a patient. An example would be a physio therapy clinic, where there are not necessarily set times and limited time slots. In this case they will accept multiple people coming in at the same time.

Typically, such a clinic would want to schedule a person for a specific time, say every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, at 11:00 AM for 3 weeks. They need not be concerned about too many people coming in during that time.

Very quickly and with only a few mouse clicks, MediFile will create daysheets, if needed, and will create the appointments. It does not look for those times and fill them if they are there, which will be a future enhancement, should it be requested.

Detail

In the Appointment scheduler, book an appointment for the patient. Be sure to connect the appointment to a specific patient.

With the patient’s name and appointment information located in the editing area, click on the Book button.



MediFile will check to ensure that you have connected the appointment with a patient, and that there is an appointment task entered. If this has not been done, you will need to do it to continue.

The Advance Booking window will be brought up.



Note that the patient’s name is located in the window title. You now need to indicate the number of appointments you want to book. This can be done in two ways.

1. Indicate the number of weeks.
2. Indicate the number of sessions (appointments)

You then need to indicate for which days of the week the appointments need to be made. If you want appointments for Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you would need to click the check boxes for each of these day.

Note that MediFile places the time of the current appointment in for the days you select. You can change this if you need to. Often, though, a patient will want to come on the same time for each day.

When you click on the book button, MediFile creates the number of appointments into the future. It creates them on the days of the week and time of day you indicated.

At the end, it places the dates and times in the clipboard of your computer so you can paste that appointment information into a label or other location to give to the patient, or to add to the patient’s chart.



In the case shown here, 5 more appointments will be created. MediFile determines that you want three appointments a week for two weeks. It knows that you have now just scheduled one that you are currently on and, therefore, subtracts one appointment from the number to book.