Daily Appointments List

Appointment
An Appointment is an entry in the Appointments Diary for a client. When you set up your diary, you are setting up the free appointment slots. You then book Appointments into these free slots. Each Appointment can be marked with a status, represented by a colour, to show that the client has arrived for their appointment (green), is currently being seen by the practitioner (orange) or the appointment is completed (purple). You can also mark an appointment as DNA (did not attend) and select a reason why the client has not attended – these are marked in red. When booking an appointment on the diary, this is normally done by highlight a free slot then selecting to add the new appointment. When doing this, the appointment details such as date, time, duration, diary user, treatment room, etc. are already known and you do not have to enter them.

Appointments Diary
The PPS Appointments Diary allows you to record your client appointments, and manage your available appointment times. There are a variety of diary view styles to suit your needs including single day, whole week, single or multiple users etc. You can access the PPS Appointments Diary from the PPS Menu: Appointments – Appointments Diary, or by pressing Ctrl-A on the Keyboard. You can also click on Appointments, or Diary on the Task Bar. The diary has a toolbar to give you access to common functions such as adding appointments, and when the diary is displayed, clicking on an item in the task bar, or selecting from the PPS menu will normally be related to the currently highlighted appointment. For example, if an appointment for Mrs Smith is highlighted, then clicking on the Accounts option on the task bar will show the accounts screen for Mrs Smith. --br-- A Practitioner on the PPS Appointments Diary is referred to as a “Diary User”. This is to allow the diary to be used by more people than just Practitioners in your practice. You can select to set up and use your diary either by Diary Users, or by Treatment Rooms – this can suit they way that you are used to booking your clients into the diary. --br-- See below for further detailed information relating to the various Appointments Diary functions in PPS.

Arrived
See: Appointment - Arrived

Being Seen
See: Appointment - Being Seen

Breakdown
This is a term used on all PPS Reports. When you run a report, you can select to breakdown the results into groups or categories. Most PPS reports allow you to breakdown to two levels. The breakdown category will have it’s own heading and sub-totals on the report. For example, if you select to breakdown your report by Practitioner, then each practitioner will have their own heading on the report, with the report results shown for that practitioner underneath the heading. At the end of the report results for that Practitioner, there will be a sub-total line showing totals for that Practitioner. Typically an accounts/revenue report could be broken down by Month then Practitioner. This means that each Month will have its own section on the report (and its own sub-total line) and then within each month, the report will show one section per practitioner. Using a breakdown on most reports is optional.

Change
See: Cash Desk; Modify

Client
Client records are the hub of your PPS database. PPS refers to these records as “Clients” rather than “Patients” because PPS is used across a variety of business and clinical disciplines, some of whom use the term “client” and others use “patient”. A client record can have either minimal details entered, such as first name and surname, or can be a comprehensive range of details including full address/contact details, alternative addresses, DOB, sex, “known as”, full profile details including “source of introduction”, occupation (plus a range of entries you can set up yourself). In addition you can associate a variety of third-parties to clients such as doctors, insurance companies, etc. The more comprehensive the details you store for each client, the greater the opportunities to use these details in your reports and mail-merge operation. For example, by recording the “source of introduction” for each client (such as yellow pages, local advert, recommendation, etc.) you can run almost any report in PPS to show a breakdown by “source of introduction”, for example “practice revenue” by “source of introduction” will show where you earn the most money from – thus where you should concentrate most on your advertising!

Details
This is a generic term used to describe the information stored in any particular part of PPS. For example Main Client Details is the information you enter to this screen. In addition, there are several “notes” type fields that allow you to enter further “free text” details against a record – these are also sometimes referred to as Details.

Diary
See: Appointments Diary

DNA
PPS uses the acronym DNA (did not attend) as a generic term for all appointments where the client did not attend. Some of you may only be used to using the term DNA for certain types of “failures to attend” but PPS uses DNA for all types. You can mark an appointment as DNA on the diary. This then allows several further options: You can allocate a Reason for Non-attendance, create a charge for the non-attendance, and select to Re-Open the appointment slot. For more details, see: Appointment – DNA.

List
List is the term used to describe information that either appears on the screen or on a report in rows and columns. The term List is also used in PPS as a list of items such as menu, or list of entries such as a look up table. See also: List style diary.

Location
A Location in PPS is a physical clinic location. Older versions of PPS referred to treatment rooms as locations. Now Treatment Rooms are an additional field of information. You can set up locations to use in your PPS Appointments Diary. You can set up your diary for diary users/practitioners to be scheduled to work either in specific treatment rooms and/or locations on various days during the week. You do not have to use “Location” if you only work from one location. To set up locations, select from the PPS Menu: Tools – Look Up Tables, and select Location from the Appointments Diary Tables section. Here you can set up your various locations, and nominate a colour to each location to make each location clearly identifiable in the diary.

Notes
See: Client - Default Notes Entry

Select
A term used when you choose something on the screen. Some PPS screens have a <Select> button, this normally means that you pick an option, or entry in a list, then click the <Select> button. This will “select” your chosen entry and proceed to the next screen, or return to the previous screen with your chosen entry selected.

Time
See: Activities – Time; Appointments – Time