Visual Practice HOW TO
...Booking/Scheduling Module Overview
How this module is
designed to work
Perhaps
the most difficult part of a medical billing and practice management system to
'get right' is the appointment booking system. Many medical offices are
'appointment-centric' in their service management methods, and rely on a very
fully featured appointment booking system to keep the office organized and
prepared to handle high volumes of patients while meeting the patients needs as
well. One major design goal was to keep the user interface simple and
uncluttered. We understand that end-users who use the appointment-centric
approach will be looking at the Booking/Scheduling window a lot, and didn't want
to create something visually overwhelming.
Most calendaring programs on the
market today are very powerful, but are not suitable for medical offices.
Examples of these are Lotus Scheduler and Microsoft's Outlook 2000. They
make excellent generalized PIM's (personal information management) tools, but
fall short in the needs of medical offices. Medical offices need to book
patient appointments and maintain a link between their patient databases (the
patient registry) and the appointment. There are also information items
that are not collected in PIM's that are a necessity for a doctor's
office. Finally, day sheet printouts must be tailored to service the needs
of a physician seeing a patient. Most PIM's are geared towards mobile
sales forces or busy executives instead of physicians booking in-office or
hospital based appointments. Finally, PIM's really fall short when the
user wishes to use patient booking information to perform billing.
Visual Practice's
Booking/Scheduling module is a comprehensive 3rd generation solution, designed
with past systems in mind, and has the most commonly requested features
end-users request.
Booking versus Scheduling
- What is the difference?
The Booking/Scheduling module
offers two kinds of scheduling. Simply put, patients appointments are
'booked' and provider time is 'scheduled'. Once medical office end-users
become familiar with an appointment booking system, they typically wish to
schedule non-patient related meetings and appointments for the provider into the
same system, to keep the provider's entire schedule in one location. When
you schedule a providers time, you can indicate if it is a patient bookable or
non-bookable space. If you indicate that the time is non-bookable (for
instance, the provider is not in the office) non-bookable time appears blocked
off in the patient booking view, making it easy to establish the availability of
the provider.
It is recommended that you
schedule providers by exception, meaning, you schedule time(s) that they are not
available. Exception scheduling works best in most environments where the
provider is available most of the time, except during times where they are
engaged in non-patient activities or are not working. The purpose is
exception scheduling is to ensure patient bookings are not made during times
where particular providers are not available. The system does not prevent
you from booking patients in unavailable times, but there are clear visual
warnings made that indicate a conflict. This is to ensure maximum
flexibility for the end-user.
Provider scheduling can also be
used to schedule overall provider availability in multi-provider clinics, where
administrative staff are challenged to ensure locums and part-time provider
staff are scheduled in to cover the clinic's open/service periods.