Schedules, Work Lists and Workflow - these are the things that make OpenVPMS easy to use. Reception staff and clinicians can almost carry out all their work starting from the Scheduling and Work List screens. The system has a concept called 'workflow' which automates many of the necessary steps to get from an appointment being made to having the visit and invoicing all completed and the patient happily checked out.
Note that you do not have to used either schedules or work lists - you can check a patient in from their Patients|Information screen. But it really does make life easier - the schedule(s) allow you set up an orderly system to enable customers to be serviced with minimum delay, and the work lists allow you to see the queue of things to be done and monitor what is happening.
This page contains the following headings: Schedules, Work Lists, Workflow, Check-In, Consult, Check-Out, Appointment status, Task status, Status Updates, Multi-Day Resource Bookings, Staff Availability, and Tools.
for resource work lists, you can set the number of slots in the list to corresponds with the number of kennels etc that the resource has. For queues and lists, the number of slots is set high - normally 100.
The normal division of labour is that the Reception staff create the appointments and check the patient in. The vet(s) then use the Consult button to enter all the visit related data using the Visit Editor, and then press it's Completed button when they are done. Reception then takes over and does the Check-out.
optionally presents a tailored list of patient letters and forms to be selected for printing (for example admission forms). If any letters are selected and these have fill-ins, then these will be prompted for. Depending on the document template setup, the forms may be printed immediately or held until check-out time.
a task is created in the selected work list. The task type is set to the default for the work list, the notes field is set to the appointment reason with any appointment notes concatenated to it so it comes out like 'Checkup - owner worried about weight gain'. The task status is set to Pending.
creates a Visit entry in the patient's medical record with reason set to the appointment reason, and the status 'In Progress'. Note that in some cases an existing visit is re-used - see Concepts/Visits.
presents the Visit Editor screen. The appropriate visit information could be entered immediately, but normally (since the Reception staff are probably doing the check-ins and not the clinicians) this is exited using the OK button without entering further information.
Note that the In Progress and Completed buttons are only available on the Invoice tab of the Visit Editor.
presents the Finalise Invoice? window so that you can finalise the invoice. If you say Yes, then its status will be set to Finalised.
if the invoice is now finalised then the Pay Account? window is displayed. If you say Yes, then the New Payment window is displayed so that the payment can be made.
The following table shows the change in status of the appointment (in the schedule), the task (in the work list), and the invoice as things progress from a new appointment to all being completed. The actions are the buttons that are pressed on the various screens. Where the same action is shown for both the Schedule and the Work List, this simply means that the button is shown on both screens and you can use either one.
You can of course manually alter the status, but in general you should not need to do, the workflow will take care of setting the appropriate status resulting from each action. The exceptions are: placing an invoice on hold, and cancelling an appointment or task - you need to do these manually - but you won't need to do this often.
Note also that because the appointment and task are linked, changing the status of one will generally change the status of the other. Thus if you have an appointment checked in (and thus the task has been created and has status Pending), then the customer walks out, then you can simply change the status of either the task or the appointment to Cancelled and this will also update the other one automatically.
This section discusses how to handle multi-day resource bookings.
Because we have limited the number of slots in the work list, the system will tell you if you are trying to book boarding between dates where the number of cages/runs available on any day between those dates exceeds the maximum.
You can now create 'appointments' which indicate staff unavailability for various reasons.