Form Letters in Partner

Partner can generate form letters, drawing information from a patient or account record. Partner includes a series of “fill in the blank” letters, and when you generate a letter, Partner automatically enters the correct information.

For example, you might send physical recall letters reminding families to call and schedule an appointment. You could also send account balance letters or collection notices. If your office moves, you may want to generate an information letter for all active patients.

You can generate form letters from within the Patient Editor (notjane), the Family Editor (fame), Partner’s recaller program, or the Personal Money Tracking Assistant (persview). You can create a single form letter at any time, or you can configure a form letter, such as a HIPAA policy statement, to print out automatically for each appointment.

Introduction to Form Letters in Partner

When you want to create a new form letter in Partner, email a copy to PCC Support. We can help you figure out the best way to create a form that meets your office’s needs.

Edit and Maintain Forms in Partner

Partner has a built in form letter editor: waffle. The waffle program is a powerful, friendly form-letter editor that makes it easy to edit your existing form letters or create new ones from scratch.

PCC Support can help set up your letters in waffle and also train your staff to edit and update them as needed. When your letters are in waffle, you can make changes quickly on your own.

Create a Form Letter in a Word Processor and Export to PDF

If you have particular style and layout needs for your letters, you may decide to create your form letter in another program.

Some practices edit all of their form letters in a word processor, export a PDF file, and then send the file to PCC Support to have the form added to Partner.

Read below to learn how you can use waffle. Contact PCC at <support@pcc.com> or 1-800-722-1082 with any questions.

Run Waffle

waffle is a powerful, friendly form-letter editor that makes it easy to edit your existing forms and create new ones from scratch. In this section, learn how to run waffle and get to know the letter selection screen. Then read the sections below to learn about all of waffle‘s advanced features.

Edit a Form Letter

Follow the procedure below to make a basic change to an existing form letter. Then read the sections below to learn about all of waffle‘s advanced features.

Partner comes with several sample form letters already installed. You can use the procedure above to quickly rephrase sentences or add paragraphs to the default letters.

Now that you know how to open a form letter and edit it, read the remaining sections to learn more about the tools and variables available for your form-letter creation.

Add a New Form Letter

Follow the procedure below to create a new form letter from scratch.

Clone an Existing Form Letter

What if you want to make a lot of changes to an existing form letter in Partner and still keep the original as a back-up?

The Clone feature creates a copy of a selected letter. Cloning the “Gym Excuse Letter,” for example, adds a new letter to the end of your form-letter list called the “(NEW) Gym Excuse Letter.”

Follow this procedure to clone a letter:

Delete a Form Letter

When a form letter becomes obsolete, you may wish to remove it. The Delete option on the Advanced Commands screen will mark the selected letter for deletion.

Follow this procedure to delete a letter:

You may delete multiple letters at once; none of them will actually be removed until you press F1 – Save and Quit.

Is it Gone Forever?: Deleting a letter does not fully erase the letter from your system. The pound sign at the beginning of the letter’s name simply removes the letter from waffle and all Partner programs. If you need to retrieve an old letter that you accidentally deleted, call PCC support at 1-800-722-1082 or support@pcc.com.

Share a Form Letter

After putting a lot of thought, time, and effort into designing a particular form letter, you may wish to share your form letter with other Partner users around the country. You could print a sample letter and fax it to your friend, but then they would have to retype the letter in waffle on their system, and any special questions or other associated files would not be transferred.

The Share feature helps you send your form letter, along with all associated files, to another person. Follow this procedure to send any Partner form letter to another Partner client:

Note: Would you like to practice sharing a form letter before sending it to other people? Try sharing a letter to your own e-mail address.

Receive and Install a Shared Form Letter

When someone shares a form letter with you, it will arrive as an attachment to an e-mail message. You will be able to read the e-mail message the sender used and see the form letter attachment. You can preview the form letter and then add it your own set of waffle letters.

Limitations: Previewing and installing shared form letters only works in the pine e-mail program. If you use elm or a graphical e-mail program (like Thunderbird or Apple Mail) you will have to run pine to receive the form letter attached to the message. You can learn about pine by reading Pine Internet and Network E-mail, or you can contact PCC support and they will load the shared letter into your system for you.

Follow this procedure to preview and install the shared form letter:

Advanced Form Letter Editing

Creating a basic Partner form letter is easy. Form letters consist mostly of plain text, just like this paragraph. But form letters may also contain variables that are automatically replaced with text, printer control codes that change the style or size of your font, questions that are answered when the form is actually generated, and logletter commands that will record information in an account’s history.

In the sections below, you can learn how waffle‘s advanced features can help you achieve exactly the content and style that you want for your form letter.

Tip: When starting a brand new letter, write the basic text before worrying about variables, text formatting, or advanced form letter features. Write what you want to say first, then revisit the letter to add the extra variables and commands.

Bold, Italics, and Font Sizes

Partner has some of the same font and formatting capabilities as a word processor. Just as you can add Partner variables to your form letters that will change into account or patient information, you can add printer control codes that will change into an instruction for the printer to change font size or switch to bold or italic type-setting. You can use these codes to turn a boring form letter or crowded encounter form into a clean, readable, and professional looking document.

The quick brown fox \001setEmph\001jumped over\001resetEE\001 the lazy dogs.

Include Variables on Form Letters

If you include variables in the body of a form letter, they will be replaced with actual data from a patient or account when you generate the letter. As you create your form letter, you can choose from over hundreds of fields of information in the various PCC databases. The available fields include names, insurance company information, aged balances, status flags, practice information, and even patient vitals and other information from the patient’s chart.

Variables work in both plain text and PDF form letters. You can create plain text form letters yourself in the waffle program in Practice Management. PCC Support can also help you turn PDFs into form letters.

Plain Text Form Letters

To use any field’s variable, place it in your form letter between a greater-than (<) and less-than (>) symbol:

        Your child, <patname2>, is overdue for an MMR shot!

When printed, the above text will include the patient’s full name.

        Your child, John T. Canning, is overdue for an MMR shot!

PDF Form Letters

When creating a PDF template for a form letter, leave blank spaces wherever you want PCC Support to place variables.

Sample Form Letter with Variables

Below is a sample HIB immunization letter that was written using waffle. Notice how variables are used in both the header and the text of the letter:

———————————————————- 
<prac.name> 
<prac.addr1> 
<prac.addr2> 
<prac.city> 
<prac.state> 
<prac.zip> 
<prac.phone> 
———————————————————- 
<today> 
Dear <aname>, 
In checking our records, we have discovered that <patname> 
has not received any HIB immunizations and is therefore at 
risk.  Please call (802) 123-4567 between 9AM and 5PM for an
 appointment to have your child immunized. Thank You.

Adjust the Space Around a Variable

Unless otherwise specified, Partner will fill in 15 spaces for each variable in a letter. This default space works fine for items in a list, but may look strange if you use variables in the middle of a sentence.

Eliminating Extra Space

Consider the following salutation:

Dear <aname>,

If the recipient account’s name is “Al Wells” then Partner will take up 15 spaces before printing the comma after his name. In other words, your letter would print like this:

Dear Al Wells       , 	

You can use variable formatting symbols to change how empty spaces are handled. If you add the symbols “;%s” Partner will use only the number of spaces it needs when filling in the blanks. Tell Partner to only use the eight spaces of the name “Al Wells” like this:

Dear <aname;%s>, 		

The letter will print out like this:

Dear Al Wells, 		

As seen in this example, adding ;%s to Partner variables will make your form letters appear much nicer.

Precise Variable Positioning

The “;%s” command characters will work best for most formatting needs. But sometimes you may need to specify exactly how many spaces a field can take up in a letter. If you needed to create columns and rows, for example, you could make each variable take up exactly 20 spaces. You might also need to control whether the text is right or left justified. Finally, you may wish to show only the first eight character’s of a patient’s name, and chop off the end of a name if it is longer.

In order to see how all of this works, we will examine a formatted variable which uses all of these features. Here is an example showing a lot of formatting for a variable:

<aname;%-20.10s>

As you can see, extra characters were added between the percent sign and the letter “s”. The extra characters are what define the formatting of the variable. These symbols appear in a specific order. Here is a breakdown of the above example, showing the proper ordering of the characters and describing how each portion affects the formatting of the variable:

String all of these elements together, translate them into English, and:

<aname;%-20.10s>

Becomes:

“Print out the guarantor account’s name in a field that takes up a total of twenty spaces, but only fill in the first ten characters of the name, justified to the left of the 20 character space.”

Note: Advanced formatting is optional. For example, you might not want a left-justified variable. If you leave the dash (-) out of the above example, the variable will right-justify. Only use the dash when you want the variable to be left-justified.

The “20.10” numbers above specify a minimum and a maximum space allowed for the text content. If you want the field “aname” to take up exactly eighteen spaces, just enter: <aname;%18s>.

Working with Digits: When you use a ‘d’ instead of an ‘s’, the variable will be interpreted as a digit, leading to slightly different behavior. For example, if you specify that more characters should be displayed in a digit than are available, the variable may appear with extra zeroes. The variable <p.pcc;%6.6d> for a patient with PCC number 3313 will appear as “003313”.

Other Variable Space Formatting Samples

Here are other examples of formats and how they print. For this example, the account name is “Billy A Gillespie” with seventeen characters.

FORMAT                        RESULT 
_____________             ________________________________ 
<aname>                   ‘Billy A Gillespie            ‘ 
<aname;%s>                ‘Billy A Gillespie’ 
<aname;%20s>              ‘   Billy A Gillespie’ 
<aname;%-20s>             ‘Billy A Gillespie   ‘ 
<aname;%20.5s>            ‘               Billy’ 
<aname;%-20.5s>           ‘Billy               ‘ 
<aname;%7s>               ‘Billy A Gillespie’ 
<aname;%7.7s>             ‘Billy A’

Form Letter Variable List

You can use patient, family, practice, and schedule information inside your form letters. You can even create a form letter with vitals and other charted information! To learn how, read Using Form Letter Variables. This document is a list of possible variables you can use.

Is This a Complete List?: From time to time, PCC updates and adds variables for new features. You can see the complete list of variables on your PCC system by typing less /PCC/partner/lib/arf.pick at a command prompt.

Replace the Number Sign: Where you see a number sign (#), replace it with a numerical value (1, 2, etc.). For example, the variables for insurance information all begin with “i#.” as in the name of the company, “i#.name.” In that case, you would replace the # with a number indicating whether you meant to show the name of the primary, secondary, or other insurance plan for the patient.

Locations and Care Centers?: When you generate a form, it automatically fills in different variables based on the patient, your practice, and other information. If you have your practice has multiple locations and generate a form letter from PCC EHR, it may not correctly identify your location information. Work with your Client Advocate to adjust your form letters so you can get the perfect form for your practice’s specific needs.

Add Special Questions to Form Letters

If Partner’s 250+ variables do not give you everything you need for your form letter, you can set up special questions that the user will answer when they generate the form letter. For example, here are some special items you might like to include that have no Partner field:

• What date can the patient return to PE?

• What was the amount of the returned check?

• How much has the family agreed to pay, per-month, to work down their outstanding balance?

• Should I greet this person as Mr., Mrs. or Ms.?

• What color car does this person drive?

Any question can be asked, and the answer can be included anywhere in the letter as it prints.

Add a Question to Your Letter

…<patname> is being excused from PE due to medical problems and

can be expected to return on or after <$1>.

<patname;%s>’s  medical situation should not keep them from

participating in PE for more than <$2> weeks.

On what date can the patient return to PE?

What is the is the maximum number of weeks?

Log Form Letters in Account History

Partner can keep track of which form letters were printed for a family. If you are negotiating with a family that does not pay their bills, it may be useful to know when they were sent a “90 Day Overdue” letter. The logletter tool makes form letter tracking automatic.

For example, your office may decide to record in the account history whenever an account is sent a “Collections” letter. By adding an “execute logletter” line to the letter, the account history will automatically indicate when the letter was generated and include a custom note.

As with billing messages, you can configure these form-letter log messages to appear in the Account History (tater), Remove Mistakes (oops), or even to show up on the family’s personal bills.

<#execute> logletter <a.pcc> “Message Text Here” 	

<#execute> logletter <a.pcc> “Printed COLLECTIONS letter” 	

<#execute> logletter <a.pcc> “Printed Referral Form for <patname>”

                       Show in Remove Mistakes?                Show on Personal Bills — White?                 Show on Personal Bills — Form?             Show on Account Histories — Brief?          Show on Account Histories — Standard?          Show on Account Histories — Detailed?

Troubleshooting Form Letters that Won’t Print

Whenever you make a change to a form letter, you should test it in fame or notjane. Below are a few errors you might encounter, a possible reason for each problem, and some possible solutions:

If you cannot solve the problem on your own, please let our Customer Care team help you figure it out. You can contact us at <support@pcc.com> or 1-800-722-7708. To speed things up, include the following information:

• Name of the letter that is causing problems

• Name of the patient or account for whom you are generating the letter

• Name of the printer

• Any error messages on the screen or the printer