You should progress the status of an appointment to reflect the current action/activity required. This can be done by highlighting an appointment and clicking the appropriate button, or by simply right clicking on an appointment. Here are the statuses in order:
- Appointment created.
- Appointment confirmed. The patient will have called or sent an email or used the SMS system to automatically do this.
- Patient arrived, waiting. At this step you will be able to confirm various current details with the patient.
- Patient with provider.
- Patient finished with provider. At this step some providers will add a notehere for receptionist to bill. Alternatively this will trigger the actual billing screen,(depending on setup of the schedule).
- Complete/DNA. Some use it to flag that the appointment is now complete, (i.e. billing done after the patient finished with provider). Some practices use this to represent a patient who did not attend. Historically, there’s been a mix of both so there’s no real ‘rule’ here and Medilink tries to cater for both usages in interfaces/various reports
- Appointment cancelled. Setting this status may at first not seem very useful as you will probably end up deleting these to fit in a new appointment in the slot; however, if you do set this status then at least this action will be logged should you later wish to review what occurred. Using the double wide schedules can also help alleviate the need to delete these, and you can also search for these using the Search Cancelled button.
There are other miscellaneous statuses usually used in specific circumstances, including:
- Non-patient appointment, AKA a note appointment.
- SMS appointment reminder created.
- SMS appointment reminder sent (acknowledged by SMS vendor).
- Review letter written. A provider may dictate a letter and a typist will produce these and then the doctor goes through and reviews the appointments marked as R
- Letter written (if using the reviews process this means it has been reviewed).