Setup Activity Templates

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

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.

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!

Create
See: Add; Charge – Create

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.

GP
See: Contacts – Doctors; Client – Third-Party Contacts

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.

Log
See: Client Log.

Mail Merge
A mail merge is when you want to send a standard letter to several of, or all your clients in one go. You can produce a Mail Merge in PPS using PPS Reports. Most PPS reports have Mail Merge as one of the output options. As an example, you can use the Client List Report to produce a mail merge. This means that instead of printing your list of clients, the same list is used as the names/addresses list to merge with a standard letter to send to each client included on the report. This gives you great flexibility for producing mail merges, as it means that you can manipulate the selections and criteria for your report first to produce a very precise list of clients to be included in the mail merge. For example, you can select to write to clients you have recorded as having a certain pre-existing condition such as diabetes, or all Female clients within a certain age range and so on, giving you great opportunities to send fairly specific targeted mailings to chosen groups of your clients. You can also use the mail merge feature to send bulk e-mails to your clients using the same mail merge options. To produce a mail merge, select from the PPS Menu: Reports – PPS Reports & Mail Merge, then select a report to run that will give you the results you need for your mail merge, for example Client List report. Use the report wizard to make any specific selections for your report, for example “clients who you last saw more than six months ago” can be selected using “Last occurrence” on step 1, and a date range of “From” date=blank and “To” date = the date as of six months ago. When you have finished your selections, click <Finish>, then on the Report Output screen click <Mail Merge>. Then on the Mail Merge output screen you have the option to either select Letters & E-Mail where you can use the PPS Letter editor to send a standard PPS letter to your clients included in the report, or select to produce a File which you can use with another mail merge program such as Microsoft Word. Alternatively, you can use Labels to prepare a mailing label for each client in your list also.

Overdue
See: Activities – Status

Patient
See: Client

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.

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

Reminders
See: Activities; Appointment - Reminders

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.

Time
See: Activities – Time; Appointments – Time