Category: G5

Maintaining Scheduler Lookups

Posted on | by SOS Blog

There are several Scheduler-specific lookup lists:

  • Appointment Status
  • Appointment Status Colors
  • Appointment Types
  • Appointment Resources
  • Encounter Form Styles

Appointment Status and Colors

Some examples of appointment statuses are:

  • Active
  • Appointment Kept
  • Confirmed
  • Did Not Show

By default, when you create a new appointment, the status will default to Active. Several of the status designations are required by the system and cannot be deleted. Others can be deleted, but not if there are any appointments in the system that use that status. If you would like to add your own custom status entries to this list, you may.

Each Appointment Status is assigned a color, which you can select or change. When you assign a status to an appointment, the status color will appear on the left edge of the appointment in the appointment grid. If you want to use a color that is not already present in the color pick-list, you can add new colors to that list from Appointment Status Colors on the Scheduler Lookups menu.

Appointment grid showing three appointments, each with a different status.

Appointment Types

When you enter each appointment, you must designate its type. The appointment’s type determines whether or not the appointment:

  • Will appear on the Appointment Check-In List, which is a report you can print to check-off patients as they appear for their appointments.
  • Can be imported as a service on the currently open daysheet to save the time and bother of having to create service entries manually.
  • Will appear on each provider’s Encounter Form report.

In addition, you can specify the duration of each type of appointment so that as soon as you select the Appointment Type while entering a new appointment, the appointment’s duration will automatically be set as well.

Appointment Resources

Appointment Resources are allow you to allocate resources such as rooms, test kits, specific media, or anything else related to providing scheduled services that may be in limited supply. If, for example, there are a limited number of play therapy rooms, you should create an Appointment Resource for each one and be sure to link one of the playrooms to any appointment that requires its use. By doing so, you will prevent accidental double scheduling of that resource.

Adding an Appointment Resource
Assigning a Resource to an Appointment

Appointment Groups

Appointments can be scheduled for a group of patients, such as a therapy group or a family group, rather than creating separate appointments for each patient in the group.

Encounter Form Styles

Encounter Forms are paper records of services provided to patients. In organizations that use these forms, they are an efficient way for providers to communicate billing information back to the billing staff. When the patient visit is complete, the provider simply checks off the service(s) rendered, fills in the appropriate boxes if she received any payments directly, and submits it to the billing staff for entry in the daysheet. The encounter form also contains the provider’s insurance identifiers, the patient’s insurance and diagnostic information to make it possible for a patient to file their own insurance using a copy of the form.

To specify which services you would like to appear in the service list on the form, use the Nav Bar to go to Scheduler Lookups > Encounter Form Styles. You can create as many Encounter Form Styles as you like, with each style specifying its own list of services. See Creating Encounter Form Styles for detailed instructions.

Changing the Time Interval in the Appointment Grid

Posted on | by SOS Blog

If the cells in the appointment views do not match the way you normally do your appointments, you can change the time intervals with two clicks. Specifically, you can show the grid with any of these intervals:

  • 60 minutes
  • 30 minutes
  • 15 minutes
  • 10 minutes
  • 6 minutes
  • 5 minutes

All you have to do is to right click the time bar on the left side of the grid to display the pop-up menu and then click the interval you prefer.

Grid with half-hour intervals.
Grid with five minute intervals.

Nothing is free, of course, so notice how much less of the day you can see with the interval set to five minutes — approximately three hours rather than the 11 hours you can see in the same screen space when the interval is set to half an hour. Experiment to see what works best for you. Don’t forget that you can quickly change the interval as often as you like, and just as quickly change it back.

An appointment that starts or ends within a displayed interval will color the entire block, but the actual appointment time is shown in a contrasting colored bar on the left of the block. In the following example, Donna’s appointment is set for 2 PM until 3:30 PM, while Jessica’s appointment is from 3:30 until 4:00. The display is best if the selected interval is the same or smaller than the appointment lengths. Half-hour intervals would be an exact match in this case, but a smaller interval, such as 15 minutes would be fine as well.

Appointments that don’t fill the current grid interval cells.
The same appointments displayed in a more
appropriate interval setting.

Adding a New Appointment

Posted on | by SOS Blog

While you can create a new appointment from any of the Appointment views, to minimize data entry, SOS recommends that you use the Day View or Work Week View. With a few clicks, you can select provider, date, and time before even clicking the New Appointment button or menu entry. Here is the step-by-step:

  1. Open Scheduler > Appointments by Provider from the navigation bar and select the view you prefer, but using the Day View or Work Week View will save data entry time in the long run. Make sure that the desired provider is showing. If not, use the Provider Filter button on the top toolbar to add him or her to the providers being displayed. See: Selecting Providers to Appear in the Appointment View.
  2. Check to be sure that you are in the Day View or Work Week View, and that the day in which you want to create a new appointment is displayed. Click the grid cell under the desired provider representing the start time of the appointment and drag down to the end time to highlight the time block(s) for the appointment.
  3. Now right click the highlight to open the pop-up menu and select New Appointment. The video below shows how the new Appointment form will come up with the starting date and time, duration, and ending time will be pre-filled based on your selections in the appointment grid. If the times are not quite correct because of the cell intervals in the view, adjust them as needed. Add the reset of the required information and save.

Selecting Providers to Appear in the Appointment View

Posted on | by SOS Blog

Regardless of the currently selected view (Day, Work Week, Week, or Month) you can filter the provider selection so that only those in which you are currently interested will appear in the appointment grid. Here is an example in which four of seven providers are displayed in the Work Week view:

Here’s another example, with the same four providers, shown this time in the Day View:

In order to specify the providers you want to see in the grid, click the Filter Providers button in the top toolbar, above the schedule grid:

A pick-list will open, in which you can tag one or more provider. Note that only those providers to which you have access appear in the list. You can tag the desired providers by holding down the <CTRL> key while clicking each of your selections. Do the same to un-tag a previously tagged provider. The tag all, or un-tag all, use the map pin buttons just above the list.

After changing your selected providers, you might have to use the “refresh” button in the top toolbar to show your new selection.

How to Enter a Large, Multi-patient Insurance Payment

Posted on | by SOS Blog

Normally every patient who receives payment from a single carrier-payer will have Insurance Plans and Policies that are linked to that single insurance carrier in SOS. See the article Understanding Insurance Carriers, Plans, and Policies. When that is true, making bulk payments is pretty painless. You enter the check, or EFT voucher, with its full amount for the first payment. When you complete the first patient’s payment, you select another patient related to the carrier, apply more of the same check or EFT voucher, and so on until the entire payment has been applied.

Manually splitting a single check across more than one SOS carrier

Nevertheless, mistakes in configuration can result in more than one of your SOS carriers in your list conveying payments in a single check or EFT. In that event, posting a payment will be a more tedious process of breaking up an EOB or EFT report into two or more groups to match the carriers used in your SOS data, entering a separate check voucher for each group, selecting the appropriate check voucher for each patient’s payments, and finally adjusting the voucher amounts to match the payments for all related payments.

There are several variations you can use to manually enter these cross-carrier payments accurately, but here is one procedure recommended by the SOS Support Team:

  1. Starting with the first patient on the EOB or EFT report, Open a new credit entry in the current daysheet.
  2. Select the Patient and the Payer, then select Check or EFT as the Credit Type.
  3. The next step, as usual, is to select an existing check or EFT voucher or to create a new voucher. As we are still working on the first patient, there will be no relevant voucher available, so create a new one by clicking the New button in the lower right corner of the voucher list.


    In the Amount field of the voucher, enter the full amount of the check or EFT.
  4. Upon saving the voucher, you will find yourself back on the Credit entry screen, and the full amount of the voucher will appear in the Credit Amount field. Jot down the name of the payer for which you entered the voucher.
  5. Confirm that the selection for the If Any Unappled Amount field is set to “Keep the unapplied amount on this Check/Voucher” as shown here:
  6. Highlight a charge in the lower area of the Credit screen and click the Apply Credit button.
  7. The Credit Split window will pop up, with the appropriate information for the charge you had highlighted when you clicked the Apply Credit button. SOS will assume that you are paying the outstanding balance for the charge, but if the payment is a lesser amount, change the value in the Amount To Apply field. If you are paying less than the full balance and would like to adjust or transfer a portion of the balance, you can also do that here. When done, click the Save and Close button to return to the Credit entry.
  8. If the EOB or EFT is paying any other charges for this patient, just repeat Steps 5 through 7 until you are ready to go on to the next patient. If there are no more charges for this patient, click Save and Close in the top toolbar to return to the Daysheet list.
  9. Now we are ready to enter a payment from the same EOB or EFT for the next patient, so create a new Credit, select the next patient and select the appropriate payer. If this new patient’s list of payers includes the same one used previously, the voucher you entered before will be available to select. Do so and loop through Steps 5 through 7 until finished with payments for this patient. If this new patient has a related, but different payer, proceed to the next step. Otherwise skip to Step 11.
  10. If there is no relevant voucher present to select, then you will have to enter a new voucher as in Step 3 above. As before, you will enter the full amount of the check or EFT for the voucher amount. Confirm the unapplied option with Step 5, jot down the name of the payer, then loop through Steps 6 and 7 until finished with payments for this patient.
  11. If there are no more patients left on the EOB or EFT, all that is left is to adjust the amount on each of the vouchers you created. Find that paper on which you jotted down the names of the insurance payers for which you created the vouchers for the EOB or EFT. (Tip: If you can’t find it, you can go to the Daysheet and recreate the list by looking in the Description column of each of the Credits you just entered.)
  12. In the main program navigation bar (usually on the left side of the screen, click Billing Lookups, then Insurance Carriers. Double-click the first payer on your list, the select either the Check Vouchers or EFT Vouchers tab, depending on whether you were paying from a check or from an EFT.
  13. Double-click the voucher that you created in the steps above. Now change the value in the Amount field to the actual amount you distributed while applying payments from this voucher. That corrected amount can be calculated two ways:
  14. Continue down your list of payers until you have adjusted the amount for every voucher you created during this procedure.