Modifying / Changing an Appointment

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.

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

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.

Modify
This is the term used throughout PPS to “change” any of your existing records. PPS has buttons on many screens with a <Modify> prompt. Clicking this button will normally take you onto a further screen that allows you to modify the selected details. For more information about modifying various types of record in PPS, see the “modify” entry under the various section of this help guide, for example Invoices – Modify, Appointments – Modify, etc.

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”.

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.

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.

Week
See: Appointments Diary – Setting Up