The Appointment Desk

Lesson Objectives In this lesson you will learn: What information is contained within the Appointment Desk. The different ways to “Close” an Appointment Desk window. How to Expand on an appointment. The different appointment statuses and their significance.

Appointment Desk Overview The Appointment Desk brings together a tremendous amount of information about a patient and their appointments. You can view patient, account and coverage information from the “Appointment Desk Display”. You can also view future and past appointment information from the Appointment Desk. Patient Header Appointment Desk Display Graphs, Calendars, and Patient Options Patient Appointments

Appointment Desk Overview: Patient Header Located at the top of the Appointment Desk, the Patient Header is displayed throughout the appointment scheduling process. It includes the patient’s name, ID number, depending on location, ChartCare#, Family#, Chart Location , PCP, Sex, DOB, Age, and HMRN. Patient Header Note: When more than one patient record is open at a time it is very important to ensure that the correct patient workspace is selected.

Appointment Desk Overview: Appointment Desk Display Much of the patient’s demographic and account-related information is centrally displayed on the Appointment Desk Display. Information displayed may include links to other tables. You can scroll down the Appointment Desk Display to view additional information.       Scroll down here to view more information.

Appointment Desk Overview: Future Appointments Includes all appointments with a status of “Scheduled”, “Present” or “Arrived” (or in some cases “Completed”) A completed appointment will remain on the future appointments tab for the current date, but will move to the past tab on the following day.      

Appointment Desk Overview: Past Appointments Includes the patient’s appointments from past dates and any appointments that were scheduled for a future date but were canceled. Note the Status column, which indicates the status of each past appointment. The standard status names are: Comp = Complete Can = Canceled Arr = Arrived Sch = Scheduled No Show = No Show Left = Left without being seen        

Expanding Patient Information Double clicking on a future or past appointment will display the Expand Information window. The appointment will appear on this screen and will include patient demographics, time/date of appointment, and the name of the staff member who made, checked in/out, confirmed, moved or canceled this appointment. Note: The “Selected Displays” checkboxes are automatically checked to view all information on the Expand screen, to remove click on the appropriate box.

Patient Options Menu Click the Patient Options button to view a menu of options available for the patient/appointment with which you are working. What options appear on this menu depends on your user security and system setup.      

Patient Lookup Window: Multiple Patient Workspaces When opening a Patient Lookup Window, if there are existing records already opened, the names will be listed on the bottom portion of the Patient Lookup Window. This acts as a reminder as to which records are currently open. You can select the patient from this listing by clicking on the name to immediately go back to that record.

Exiting the Appointment Desk When you have completed looking up patient appointment information, you can keep the workspace open and use the menu command toolbar, toolbar, or activity toolbar to open additional workspaces for this or other patients. You can have up to 5 open workspaces. The “Mini tabs” workspace is always open; that means that only 4 additional workspaces can be accessed. If you try to access more than 4 additional workspaces you will receive a Workspace Limit Reached message.

Exiting the Appointment Desk There are 2 places where you can use your mouse to close a patient record: 1. the active blue tab will have the “X” exit button and 2. to close individual screens on a patients record, use the “Close” or “Finished” buttons. You can also use keyboard keys to close, press “Ctrl+W” to close without having to use the mouse.      

Navigating the Appointment Desk: Keyboard Shortcuts Overview Shortcut keys can be accessed by clicking on the question mark (?) to access online Help. It holds a list of available keyboard shortcuts that can be used to navigate without having to use the mouse. Key in “Navigating Hyperspace” and click search. Select Navigating Hyperspace and then select “Work Faster with Keyboard Shortcuts” from the “What would you like to do” listing. (detail descriptions of each shortcut option can be found within the Epic Intro User manual on KDNet).

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