Review and Change a Patient’s Appointments in Partner
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.
Read the sections below to learn all the functions and tools of inquire, Partner’s patient appointment record.
SAM or the Appointment Book?: PCC offers two different sets of scheduling tools. This article refers to scheduling functionality found in the Practice Management system, where you schedule with SAM. For help with PCC's Appointment Book, the visual scheduler found in PCC EHR, visit Schedule a Patient.
Contents
Open SAM Inquire and Review a Patient’s Appointment Details
Run the inquire
program to review, cancel, or reschedule a patient’s appointments.
There are three ways to run the inquire
program:
-
If you are using
sam
, you can runinquire
by pressing F2 – Inquire from the Search Criteria screen. -
You can tell the scheduler to
inquire
automatically whenever you find a patient for scheduling. To turn on the automaticinquire
feature, refer to the Scheduler section of the Configuration Editor (ced
) or contact PCC. -
Finally,
inquire
can be run as a stand-alone program. PCC can add theinquire
command to your Partner windows. If you are at a UNIX prompt, typeinquire
and pressEnter
. The program will ask you to select a patient.
When inquire
runs, you will see a list of the chosen patient’s appointments, with information about each one:
For each appointment, you can see the date, time, day, provider, location, visit reason, length of visit, and appointment “Status.”
You can select specific appointments by using the arrow keys to go up and down the list. The “Notes” box at the bottom of the screen displays the visit notes of the currently selected appointment. If the patient has more appointments than can fit on the screen, the page up and page down keys allow access to the full list.
While most of the appointment information is self-explanatory, the Status column may contain varied information:
Status | Explanation |
---|---|
Enc Needed | The appointment has been scheduled, but the encounter form has not been printed yet. |
Enc: word | You have printed the encounter form, and “word” is the magic word. |
Enc: | You have printed the encounter form, but so many days have passed since printing that the word has expired and been reused. You may have posted the charges without using the magic word. |
Checked In | Someone has used the checkin program to confirm the patient’s information. The patient is probably in the building. |
Chg Posted | Someone has posted the charges for the encounter form by using the magic word in checkout . |
Visit Reviewed | This is a visit that has been reviewed in Partner. PCC is preparing its databases for new charge posting confirmation features. For now, this status is identical to “Chg Posted.” |
Canceled | This visit was canceled using the inquire program. |
Deleted | This visit was deleted using the inquire program. |
Missed | This visit was marked as missed using the inquire program or the magic program. |
Can/Del/Miss | This visit was “removed” with an old version of the inquire program that did not record how the appointment was removed. It was either marked as canceled, deleted, or missed. |
Cancel, Delete, or Mark an Appointment as Missed
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 “un-cancel” (or un-delete, or un-miss) appointments if they are removed by mistake.
Remove an Appointment
First, run inquire and use the arrow keys to select the visit you wish to change. Then use the following function keys:
F2 – Cancel Appt
Press F2 to mark an appointment as Canceled.
F3 – Delete Appt
Press F3 to mark an appointment as Deleted.
F4 – Missed Appt
Press F4 to mark an appointment as Missed.
For each of the above choices, you will see a warning screen asking you to press F1 to confirm your cancelation or F12 to keep the appointment and return to the main inquire
screen.
Once a visit is removed in one of the above ways, it can not be recovered. At the bottom of the main inquire
screen you can see a summary of the total number of missed and canceled appointments the patient has had, along with the date of the most recently canceled appointment.
Depending on your office’s configuration, deleted appointments may be invisible from the inquire screen.
Automatically Mark an Appointment Missed: PCC can create a procedure that, when posted during checkout, will automatically mark an appointment as missed and (optionally) post a fee to the responsible account. For more information, contact PCC Support.
Bring Back a Removed Appointment
If an appointment was canceled (or deleted or marked as missed) by mistake, you can select it and press the corresponding function key to “un-cancel” it.


Putting an appointment back into the schedule may lead to scheduling conflicts, if the open slot has already been taken. Your office should plan for the proper use of this feature.
Change Appointment Notes
You can change the appointment notes for any appointment in the inquire program.
Run inquire for the Patient
Use the Arrow Keys to Select the Appointment
Press F8 — Bop To Notes
When you press F8, the cursor will jump down to the appointment notes section of the screen.
Edit the Appointment Notes
Press F1 — Save New Notes to Save Your Changes
Reprint an Encounterform
You can reprint the encounter form (superbill) for any appointment in the inquire program.
Run inquire for the patient
Use the Arrow Keys to Select the Appointment
Press F6 — Reprint Enc Form
Reschedule an Existing Appointment
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.
Follow this procedure:
Find the Patient and the Appointment
Run inquire
and select the appointment that needs to be moved.
Choose F2, F3, or F4
Press F2 – Cancel Appt to cancel the existing appointment. You could also choose F3 – Delete Appt or F4 – Missed Appt, depending on the reason for rescheduling.
On the confirmation screen, press
F4 – Reschedule Appointment
Schedule the New Appointment
You will notice that the patient and visit information have been filled in for you. Enter a time frame (if desired) and press F1 – Schedule to choose the new date and time for the appointment.
Review Your Work
After you press F1 – Confirm from sam
‘s Confirmation screen, you will be returned to the inquire
screen. You should see both the old and new appointment times listed, with the old time marked as “Canceled.” The canceled (or missed) appointment will be described as “Rescheduled” in the status column.
Changing Your Mind: If you press F12 while rescheduling, you will be returned to the inquire
screen and the appointment you were rescheduling will not be canceled, deleted, or marked as missed.
Who Rescheduled?: When you use the procedure above to reschedule an appointment, inquire
automatically adds your username to the appointment note. If you ever need to know who rescheduled an appointment, run inquire
and select the appointment to review its notes.
Reschedule a Previously Canceled or Missed Appointment?: In addition to the workflow described above, you can also select a previously canceled or missed appointment and press F6 – Resched to reschedule.
Review Appointments for Multiple Siblings
You can use the SAM Inquire program to review appointment history and upcoming appointments for multiple family members at the same time.
Run inquire and Find a Patient
Press
F5 – Next Relation
Select One or More Additional Patients
Press
F1 – Continue
Review Multiple Patient Schedules