Category: G5

Creating Encounter Form Styles

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You can create as many Encounter Form Styles as you like, with each Style specifying its own list of services.

To specify which services you would like to appear in the service list on the form, use the NavBar to go to Scheduler Lookups > Encounter Form Styles.

Next, click the New button in the top toolbar, or use the <CTRL><N> hotkey, or right-click in the list area and select New from the pop-up menu. Enter a shorthand code and description for your new Encounter Form Style.

Look at the example in the figure at the top of this article. Notice that it contains not just a list of services, but also some headings to group related services. There are also blank lines to improve readability. You will be using the same SOS detail form to add all three kinds of lines. If you are not creating your Encounter Form Style based on an encounter form already in use by your organization, it is a good idea to plan your Style on paper before proceeding.

Note that only 60 lines will fit on a form, including headers and blank lines. Some offices might have an existing encounter form with more than 60 lines, but in all likelihood no single provider performs every single service on your form. Every provider in SOS can be linked to a different Encounter Form Style, so each Style should contain just those services that the provider is likely to render, plus perhaps a number of blank lines for write-ins of unusual services.

Let’s get started with an example that includes a section for “Evaluation and Testing”, and another section for “Therapy”. In both sections, we will include a number of blank lines so that the provider can manually add a service not already printed on the form.

  1. Start by adding the first heading. Click the New button at the top of the Encounter Form Lines list panel to open a detail form.
  2. Check the Section Heading box, enter the desired text, and save using the Save and New button. The Save and New button combines the save and new actions in a single mouse click, leaving you ready to enter your second line.
  3. You should see the heading line appear in the list panel in the background, and the Encounter Form Line detail form will now be empty. For our second line we want a blank line below the heading we just added, so leave the form empty and click Save and New again. You’ll see the blank line appear in position 2 in the list.
  4. Now let’s add a service line. Click the Service Code field to diplay your list of services, and select an appropriate service for this section. In our example, it will be “IE, Evaluation 120 minutes”.

    You can accept the description copied from the Service List, or adjust it as you like, then click Save and New again.
  5. We now continue, as described in the previous steps, adding the service “IV, Initial Visit”, “MMPI, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory”, “NPS, Neuropsychological Screening Battery”, and five blank lines.
  6. We continue with our next section, with the heading “Psychotherapy”, a blank line, “IT30, Individual Therapy 30 minutes”, ” IT60, Individual Therapy 60 minutes”, “GT90, Group Therapy 90 minutes”, and six blank lines. After these entries our Encounter Form Lines list looks like this:



    And when printed, the service list section for our example looks like this:


    To eliminate all that white space, be sure to configure 60 lines to each of your Styles. You can keep adding blank lines to get to 60, if necessary.

Changing the order of the lines in an Encounter Form Style

At some point in setting up your configuration, you may decide that the lines are not in the order you really want. If so, it is very easy to move a line up or down in the list. Simply highlight the line you would like to move, then use the blue Up and Down arrows in the toolbar at the top of the list to move the line to the desired position.

Linking Encounter Form Styles to your Providers

On the data screen for each of your providers, you will find a field called Encounter Form. In order to print encounter forms for the provider, you must select an existing Encounter Form Style in that field. If you do not select a Style, no encounter form will print. The Style you select, of course, will dictate which set of detail lines appears on that provider’s encounter forms.

Selecting an Encounter Form Style for a provider.

Navigating through Dates in the Scheduler

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There are several ways to move from date to date in the SOS Scheduler. For this discussion we will use the Work Week View, but almost all the other appointment grid views work in a similar fashion.

Previous and Next Arrows

Go To Date…

Calendar Side-Bar Selector

Using the month and year buttons at the top of the calendar, display the desired month, then just click on the desired date in the calendar.

Changing Existing Appointments

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Changing appointments in the Scheduler is similar to changing objects in other parts of the SOS system:

  1. Open one of the appointment views, such as the Week View.
  2. Locate the appointment you would like to delete.
  3. Right-click the appointment to open the pop-up menu.
  4. Click Open or just double-click the appointment.
  5. Make any desired changes.
  6. Save or Save and Close.

Deleting Appointments

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Deleting appointments in the Scheduler is similar to deleting objects in other parts of the SOS system:

  1. Open one of the appointment views, such as the Week View.
  2. Locate the appointment you would like to delete.
  3. Right-click the appointment to open the pop-up menu.
  4. Click Delete.

Searching for Appointments

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From the SOS Navigation Bar (usually on the left side of the screen) expand Scheduler, then click Search Appointments to display the Search Appointments List View.

Using the Auto-Filter Row

Like many other List View screens in SOS, this one has the Auto-Filter Row at the top, right under the column headings, by adjusting the text or value, and the operator (equals sign, greater than, less than, and so on) in the Filter Row for a particular column, you can change the view to display only the rows for which your filter condition is true. See the page Exploring List View Features for more details.

Using the Find Panel

Although the Find Panel is usually not displayed by default, you can open it with a couple of clicks:

  1. Right-click any column heading to open the context menu.
  2. Left-click the Show Find Panel feature.

You can then type some text to search all appointments that contain in any field the text that you typed. Let’s say that you have three patients named Jerry, as well as one provider with that name. If you type “Jerry” in the Find Panel, your list will then contain all appointments for patients named Jerry, but also all appointments for provider Jerry, regardless of the patients’ names.

On the other hand, if you type “Jerry” in the Patient/Subject column of the Filter Row instead, “Jerry” present in any other column will be ignored; only patients with Jerry in their name will be selected. Again, for more details see Exploring List View Features.

Checking for Previous or Future Appointments for a Specific Patient

If you are interested in either previous or future appointments for a specific patient, you can see those by opening any appointment for that patient and looking at the Previous Appointments tab, or the Future Appointments tab of the appointment. In fact, you can even open a new appointment, select the patient of interest, and look at those tabs before completing and saving the new appointment. You don’t have to use a previously saved appointment to take advantage of the feature. In fact, it is often during the entry of a new appointment that you might wonder if there are any future appointments already in the system for this patient, so all you have to do is to jump over the the Future Appointments tab to check.

In addition, you can always find a list of all a patient’s appointments by opening up the patient and selecting the Appointments tab.

  1. Start with the Patients – All Data selection on the SOS Navigation Bar.
  2. Open the desired patient.
  3. Select the Appointments tab.

All of the patient’s appointments will be shown in the list, but you can easily change the conditions in the first column of the Find Row to narrow down the range. By default, the operator in the first row is the equals sign, but you can easily change it to greater than (or greater than or equal to) or less than (or less than or equal to) to filter the list to just future appointments or just previous appointments, respectively by clicking the equals sign in that column header:

Once you have the desired operator, type or select or type the appropriate date for your list filter. For example, if you wanted to find all appointments in the future, you would change the operator to “is greater than” and type or select the current date in the Date column Find Row.