Letters

Letters are an activity type in PPS. This option can be selected at any time to send a letter to either a client or a third-party that has been previously created on the system, or to an anonymous contact that is not on the system. This screen can be accessed by either selecting from the PPS Menu > Activities > Send a Letter, or by selecting “Send a Letter” from the PPS Task Bar on the left hand side.

In addition you can also select to send a letter as part of your clinical notes recording. When sending a letter, there is the choice of either selecting a standard letter from your list of standard PPS letters, or by simply typing a letter using the PPS letter editor before printing and sending. Letters can either be sent now or scheduled to be sent in the future.

Letter Selections
Letters created in PPS can be assigned to specific practitoners with specific due dates and times. Furthermore by clicking on 'Auto-Notify', the practitioner selected who is responsible for completing the letter activity will be prompted by a pop up box at the due date and time.

Depending on the letter that is being selected, there are options to auto preview the letter, and to automatically print off an address label via a label printer when the letter is printing off.

If the activity has appeared as an action to process, it can be postponed by an chosen amount of minutes, hours, days, etc if required.

Microsoft Word
If using Microsoft Word to print a letter, then the list of standard letters (which can include very simple templates that simply have the client’s address/salutation details at the top) will include letters that have been set up in Word. By using the 'Open' button, PPS can edit and then save the Word document before printing or e-mailing this onto the contact that is chosen.

Action
See: Personal Action

Activities
Activities in PPS are a way of keeping a record of contacts, telephone calls, letters, etc. that you have with your Clients or Third-Party contacts. Activities can all have a specific PPS User, and Practitioner assigned to them, and can be scheduled for completion in the future or immediately. Activities appear in the Client Log for each client, as well as on the Activities List and the Task List. A System of colours is used to denote activities that are: Due – Green; Not yet due – Orange; Completed – Purple and Overdue (task list only) – Red. See Also: Activities – Activity Types

Address
See: Client - Address

Auto Preview
See: Client Log – Auto Preview; Client Browse – Auto Preview

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!

Clinical Notes
The Clinical Notes facility in PPS is available in the “Professional” version of PPS. This includes screens to record your Clinical Notes, manage Treatment Episodes, complete specific forms (Custom Forms) including body charts and your own questionnaires, etc. All Clinical Notes are structured into the framework of Treatment Episodes. Although some of you may be used to slightly different terminology, PPS uses “Treatment Episode” to define a specific course of treatment for a specific condition, and “Consultation” as the individual treatment sessions/consultations. Therefore each time you see a client – whether or not it is an initial consultation/assessment or a follow up treatment – this is known as a “Consultation”. You can have more than one current Treatment Episode per client if required. When you select to record clinical notes, PPS checks to see if there are any current (not completed) Treatment Episodes for the client. If there is more than one, you can choose which one to record your consultation notes for. Otherwise a new Treatment Episode will be started, and this consultation will be consultation number one for the new Treatment Episode. When you complete the consultation, you can enter set up the full details of the Treatment Episode including the name, number of consultations required, diagnosis details etc. See: Treatment Episode for more details. For more detailed information about recording clinical notes and consultations, see: various entries under Consultation and Custom Forms.

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.

Include
This is a term used in the PPS Reports Wizard – on step 3 of the selections for your report. On most reports you can select to “include” a selection of details on the printed report. You can un-tick any items that you do not want to include. The “Include” options only apply when the report is printed or previewed – if you are exporting the report to a file or mail merge, then the “include” options do not apply.

Letters
Letters are an activity type in PPS. You can select at any time to send a letter to either a client or a third-party. You can send a letter either by selecting from the PPS Menu: Activities – Send a Letter, or by selecting “Send a Letter” from the PPS Task Bar. In addition you can also select to send a letter as part of your clinical notes recording. When you send a letter, you have the choice of either selecting a standard letter from your list of standard PPS letters (see: Standard Letters), or by simply typing your letter using the PPS letter editor before printing and sending. Letters can either be sent now or scheduled to be sent in the future. If you are using Microsoft® Word to print your letters, then your list of standard letters (which can include very simple templates that simply have the client’s address/salutation details at the top) will include letters that you have set up in Word. If you are sending a letter as part of a Mail Merge output from a PPS Report, then this will be a PPS letter. To do a mail merge using a Word letter, you will have to produce a “File” output from the PPS mail merge output screen, and do the mail merge separately and completely in Word.

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.

Microsoft Word
Microsoft® Word is a Word Processing application. It is supplied as part of Microsoft® Office. PPS can use Word to produce individual letters to clients or third-parties. This can be done by setting up a PPS Standard Letter which is a “Word Document”. This standard letter can then be used when sending a letter to a client or third-party. See also: Standard Letters; Letters.

Notes
See: Client - Default Notes Entry

Notify
Within the PPS Activities system, you can set any activity record to “notify” you when it becomes due. To do this, the activity must have a relevant “due date”, and optionally a “due time”. If an activity has a “due time” then it will become due at that precise time. PPS can be set up to notify you during the day of activities that become due at a precise time. You can set for each systems user how often PPS checks for messages and activities. If an activity does not have a “due time”, or the activity became due whilst you were not logged into PPS, then you will be alerted about all activities that are now due when you log into PPS.

Open
Some screens in PPS have an “Open” button on the toolbar, this is very similar to the Modify button as it will “open” the selected record for “modification”.

Options
PPS has a screen on the PPS Tools menu called Options. This screen can be used to set up a wide variety of system settings that affect the way that PPS works. You can make your changes to these areas and press the OK or Apply button to save your changes. The Options screen has four tabs along the top: General, Custom Client Fields, Set Up Client Contacts, and Clinical Notes. See the entries under each of these sections for more details, for example Options – General.

PPS
PPS is the acronym for “Private Practice Software”.

Practitioner
A practitioner in PPS is a system user. To add a practitioner to PPS, you need to add a new system user, and indicate that they are a practitioner as part of their user details. When a user is a practitioner, they appear on the list of practitioners to select to allocate to most PPS records. PPS allocates a practitioner to most types of records so that you can see which practitioner is responsible for that record, also you can break down most report in PPS by practitioner.

Preview
See: Reports – Report Output

Print
You can print various types of information in PPS including client details, clinical notes, Invoices, letters, and a wide variety of reports. All printing in PPS is done using your standard Windows printer driver for your selected printer. Many screens in PPS have a <Print> button that is used to print details for that part of the system. See also: Reports – Report Output.

Printing
See: Print

Salutation
In PPS, this is how you refer to someone in a letter. This applies to Clients and Third-Party contacts. You can enter the salutation on the Main Client Details screen for each of your clients – some clients you may prefer to use their title and surname and others that you know better you may use their first name. The same applies to Third-Party contacts where an individual’s name is used (instead of just a Company name). You can use “Salutation” as a “merge field” when setting up or sending letters. There is a Salutation field available for Clients, and one for each Third-Party contact types (insurance companies, clubs, etc.) When a letter is printed using the Salutation merge field, the field is replaced with the Salutation entry, if no entry is made into the Salutation field, then the Client Title and Surname is used to replace the merge field.

Save
PPS Uses a <Save> button on many screens. This will save the updates that you have made to this screen and store them permanently in your database. One some screens the <Save> button will also close the screen.

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.

Send a Letter
See: Letter

Set Up
See: Medical History – Setting Up; PPS – Setting Up; Custom Form – Maintenance; Users – Setting Up; Letterhead – Set Up

Task Bar
The PPS Task Bar is a tool bar that is positioned down the left hand side of the main PPS screen. It contains a calendar that can be used to navigate the Diary and the Daily List, and has quick access to various parts of PPS via Icons, headings and Prompts that can be clicked with the mouse. If your screen resolution is too small, then the icons are removed and just the Headings and prompts remain. You can switch the task bar on and off by selecting from the PPS menu: View – Task Bar.

Time
See: Activities – Time; Appointments – Time

Word
See: Microsoft® Word