To insure an accurate audit trail, completely deleting an appointment in ChiroSuiteEHR is not allowed. If your staff were allowed to delete appointments without explanation, you would risk losing valuable information, both statistical as well as potential financial information. By having an audit trail associated with the appointment book, instead of deleting appointments, an incorrectly scheduled or missed appointment is resolved, with an associated explanation.
Appointment Resolution was touched upon in Chapter 10: Front Desk Operations in the section for MIA (Missing In Action) patients, that is, those that missed appointments. In the Appointment Scheduler, it works the same way as on the Front Desk.
In the Appointment Scheduler, click on the date of the missed appointment and right click on the name of the patient. When the popup menu appears, select Resolve Appointment/View Log (figure 17).
Figure 17
The Appointment Resolution window provides user modifiable options to enter the Action Taken by Staff. (figure 18) Select the appropriate item from the drop down list and click the New icon. This will enter that item in the text box below it with a date and time stamp. It gives the User the ability to type in additional information if necessary.
Figure 18
Once the Action has been entered, there are a few other options that empower the office staff (figure 19).
Figure 19
For some of the Actions, the staff person may want a pop up reminder to appear on the Front Desk window at a later point in time. In the Next Alert drop down, any number between 1 and 99 can be selected. In the next drop down box, select what that number applies to: minutes, hours, or days. In the Status drop down, verify that it says Open in order for the Appointment Resolution pop up to appear at the selected time. If any other Status is selected, the patient will be removed from the MIA list and there will NOT be any pop up reminder. Selecting an Action such as Rescheduled automatically changes the Status to something other than Open.
Note that in addition to the Appointment tab there is also a Patient Information tab in this Appointment Resolution window (figure 20). The Patient Information tab displays the patient’s phone numbers to make it easy for the staff person to contact the patient. It also displays a financial overview of the patient’s account. It is up to the management of the practice to determine at what point the call should be turned into a collection call instead of a rescheduling or reactivation call.
Figure 20