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.

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:

1. If you are using sam, you can run inquire by pressing F2 – Inquire from the Search Criteria screen.

2. You can tell the scheduler to inquire automatically whenever you find a patient for scheduling. To turn on the automatic inquire feature, refer to the Scheduler section of the Configuration Editor (ced) or contact PCC.

3. Finally, inquire can be run as a stand-alone program. PCC can add the inquire command to your Partner windows. If you are at a UNIX prompt, type inquire and press Enter. 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:

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:

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.

Reprint an Encounterform

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

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:

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.