Deleting appointments in the Scheduler is similar to deleting objects in other parts of the SOS system:
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.
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.
Although the Find Panel is usually not displayed by default, you can open it with a couple of clicks:
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.
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.
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.
There are several Scheduler-specific lookup lists:
Some examples of appointment statuses are:
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.
When you enter each appointment, you must designate its type. The appointment’s type determines whether or not the appointment:
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 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.
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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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