Partner

There are three ways to remove an appointment from the schedule. You can record that the patient has canceled the appointment, you can delete an appointment (if it is a mistake, for example), or you can mark that the patient has missed the appointment. All three of these functions are controlled in the inquire program.

You can change the appointment notes for any appointment in the inquire program.

Use inquire to look up a patient's future or past appointments. In inquire, you can make changes to appointment status or appointment notes, or cancel an appointment. Finally, you can reschedule any appointment in inquire, moving an existing appointment to a new date and time.

You can reprint the encounter form (superbill) for any appointment in the inquire program.

When a patient wants to reschedule, you could make them a new appointment without canceling the old appointment, but then the patient would be double booked! Instead, use inquire to both reschedule the appointment at a different time and cancel the old appointment at the same time. sam will transfer the basic visit information to the new appointment.

Run the inquire program to review, cancel, or reschedule a patient's appointments.

You can use the SAM Inquire program to review appointment history and upcoming appointments for multiple family members at the same time.

The Day View displays a provider's appointments for a day as well as how busy each provider is on that day. You can review your office's schedule and book appointments in any time slot. You can jump to a date that is unavailable or full and force in an appointment, a feature unavailable on the Normal View.

Who booked an appointment on your screen? Why is a unit of time double or triple-booked? The Normal View only shows basic information about each unit of time. Use the Detailed View to review a busy schedule, as well as double-book or remove blocks.

The Normal View in the Scheduler offers available times based on the criteria you entered on the Search Criteria screen. The earliest and best matches for the criteria you entered will be in the middle row, and the first available match is highlighted, ready to be confirmed.

The topics in this section explain each scheduling step and each sam screen in detail. Read these sections to learn about each step in more detail and review the advanced features to help you quickly find the right appointment for every patient.

You can launch the scheduler from several other Partner programs. For example, if your staff uses pen (Phone Encounter Notes) to handle triage calls, you can schedule directly from that program. If your front desk needs to schedule a follow-up visit while checking out a patient, they can press [fkey title='F8' subtitle='Patient Schedule'] while posting charges in checkout and jump into the scheduler. In fact, the programs checkin, pen, checkout, tickle, and the lab module all have a link to sam. If you use those tools, you will benefit from a direct link to the scheduler. Look for keys like this:

Press [fkey title='F1' subtitle='Schedule Appt'] from the Normal, Detailed, Day, or Patient View to begin confirming appointments listed at the top of the screen. From the Notes and Confirmation screen you can enter notes and confirm the appointment:

After you select a patient, you will see the SAM Search Criteria screen shown below. From here you can review information about the patient, add more patients and relatives for scheduling, jump to several other Partner programs, or enter visit criteria to schedule a new appointment.