You can enter the basic patient demographics from any of the patient lists: Patients (All Tabs), Patients – Billing, Patients – Clinical, or of course, Patients – Demographics.
After opening one of the patient lists, click the “New” icon at the left of the top tool bar.
Just the heading area of the patient form will appear.
The ID field will default to a unique number value, but you can turn that feature off if you would rather manually enter your own alphanumeric identifiers for each patient. In addition, you can specify the range used for the auto-numbered IDs. See Specifying System Options for more details.
Continue through the remaining fields. It is just first and last names that are required, but it is strongly recommended that you specify the patient’s date of birth as well. Note that Age is automatically calculated based on the DOB and the system’s internal Patient # as well as the description of the patient’s initial care episode are both generated automatically. You will be able to change the care episode description after saving this initial data if you choose. (See Managing Patient Care Episodes for details.)
When you are finished, click the Save button on the top toolbar, or use the <CTRL><S> hotkey.
The rest of the Patient Form will immediately appear, so you can continue in the next panel with Sex, Marital Status, Race, and so on. With the exception of Years of Education and Notes, all of these fields have lookup lists to make data entry fast, easy and consistent. Note that these lookup lists include a “New” button in the lower right corner so you can quickly add new selections to these lists as needed.
That brings us to the next step, entering the patient’s address, phone, and email information. See the next article in this series, Entering a New Patient, Step 3: Patient Communications.
Previous: Entering a New Patient, Step 1
Next: Entering a New Patient, Step 3: Patient Communications
Related Articles:
Entering a New Patient, Step 4: Contacts
Managing Patient Insurance Payers
Managing Patient Non-Insurance Payers
Managing Patient Care Episodes
Managing Patient Posted Charge Entries
Managing Patient Posted Payments and Adjustments
Recording Patient Psycho-Social History
Managing Billing and Clinical Documents for a Patient
Creating a Patient Treatment Plan
Recording Progress Notes
Recording Prescriptions
Recording Allergies
What Are User-Defined Fields?
