SMS Message Setup

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

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.

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.

Known As
When recording your client details, you can select for each client the name that the client is known by to you. This can be useful if the name that you use to refer to the client is different from how you would address the client in letter (you can also specify the “salutation” to use when writing to the client). If you have entered the Known As details, then when the client’s details are displayed on most other screens in PPS such as the Clinical Notes and Accounts screens then the “known As” is displayed in parenthesis next to the proper client name thus: Jean Ainsworth (Jeanie).

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.

Network
You can run PPS on your PC Local Area Network. If you need to run PPS across a “wide network” or across the internet, then you will need to talk to your PPS supplier for details of how to do this. --br-- If you would like to run PPS on your local network, then make sure that your PPS licence includes the appropriate number of “concurrent” users required (the number of users who can log into PPS at the same time). Extra concurrent licences can be purchased from your PPS Supplier. You are sent a new PPS Registration File each time you purchase more licences. --br-- In order to install PPS on a PC on your network, first make sure that the location that the main PPS database is installed is “shared” on the network, and allows “other users to update files”. Doing this ensures that the “network installation” of PPS can locate the database across the network and successfully log into the database. --br-- Also See: Installation New Look up this under the type of new record – e.g. appointment - new

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

Reminders
See: Activities; Appointment - Reminders

SMS Message
PPS has the option to send an SMS message (or schedule one to be sent) as part of the PPS Activities system. SMS Messages are sent either by directly posting the message to an internet web site, or by sending a specially formatted e-mail to a preconfigured e-mail account; the provider of this e-mail account simply converts your e-mail message into an SMS message and sends it to the required recipient’s mobile phone. This facility requires that you have an account with a third-party SMS messaging provider – this option is available on the Tools menu in PPS. There is a small charge per message sent (the charge is similar or less than sending an SMS from your phone).