In the event that an appointment is cancelled, for tracking and future analysis, it is best to mark the appointment as canceled instead of simply deleting it.
The same is true of rescheduling appointments. You could simply open the appointment and change the date and/or time, but SOS recommends that you use the built-in Cancel/Reschedule feature instead. Doing so is faster, but also leaves a trail so that you can easily identify patients (or providers) who make a habit of moving appointments around.
Both Cancel and Cancel/Reschedule operations are easily executed from options on the right-click menu in the scheduling grids.
Canceling an appointment
To cancel an appointment (with no rescheduling), right-click the appointment and select Cancel on the pop-up menu. The following window will appear. Just select the appropriate cancellation reason and click OK at the bottom of the window.
Note that cancelled appointments can be hidden or displayed in the appointment grid by changing a grid display option in the top tool bar, as demonstrated in the short video clip below. (The appointment in the grid was previously cancelled as described above. )
Cancelling / Rescheduling an appointment
As explained above, you can quickly cancel and reschedule an appointment in one quick step. Right-click the appointment to display the pop-up menu, then select the Cancel / Reschedule option. The Cancel / Reschedule window will appear, showing the existing appointment details. Change the date and/or time and click OK at the bottom of the window to save and return to the appointment grid.
If the grid option is set to “Show All Appts”, you will now see both the original appointment (the status now changed to “Cancelled and Rescheduled”, along with the new, active appointment.
Note the different colors on the left edge of the two appointments.
SOS offers two similar, but not identical, operations:
Copying an appointment results in the creation of one copy of the selected appointment on another date and/or time.
Replicating an appointment gives you a way to quickly create a series of appointments at a specified interval. For example, you can create 8 weekly (7 day interval) appointments, all identical to the currently selected appointment.
In both cases, you start by right-clicking the appointment you want to duplicate. The pop-up menu will appear and you will see both options listed:
If you select Copy, the following window will appear:
If you select Replicate, on the other hand, a different screen will appear:
When you are ready to proceed with the operation, just click OK at the bottom of the window.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
