The easiest way to schedule an appointment would be to double click on an empty time slot. This would open the Add/Modify Calendar dialog (Fig. 2) so that you can specify the appointment details. You could also click the New Appt… button and then select the date and time for the appointment.

Double clicking on an existing appointment will re-open it so that you can edit it. If the slot that you wanted to use had been scheduled already, you could book more patients in it by clicking the New Appt… button to the right of the screen and selecting the date and time from the Add/Modify Calendar dialog. The system would display a warning message saying that the appointment being scheduled conflicts with an existing one, but will otherwise allow you to schedule multiple appointments in the same time slot.

To link a patient record to the appointment, you could click on either the New… or Existing… buttons. The first would allow you to create a new patient record on the fly, the second would open the Search Patient screen to select an existing patient from the database.

Once a patient has been linked to an appointment, if you needed to make adjustments to his record, you could do so by clicking Modify…. If your computer’s Windows Dialer was configured to make telephone calls, you could click the phone button next to the patient’s home and work number fields to call him.

Aside from the date, time and patient information; appointments require a ‘Location’, ‘Physician’, ‘Service’ and ‘Duration’. The remaining fields in the Add/Modify Calendar dialog box are used to set the appointment ‘Status’, enter Authorization information, put the appointment ‘On Wait List’ and enter appointment notes.

Clicking the Recurrence… button would display the Appointment Recurrence dialog. From here you could specify a recurrence pattern for the appointment or, if one had been previously specified, remove it.

The Schedule… button opens the Search Appointments screen which you could use to search for available time slots for a physician or resource. Here, you could Search within a given date range for a slot of a certain ‘Service’ and/or specific ‘Duration’. If you found another time slot that worked better, you could double-click on it to have the date and time adjusted on the Add/Modify Calendar dialog box.

The Previous and Next button would display other appointments booked within the same time slot that the current appointment has.

If a patient wants an appointment for a certain date and time when there is no availability on the calendar, you could still setup an appointment for him on the wait list by checking the ‘On Wait List’ checkbox. You could then assign a numerical value for the ‘Wait list priority’. The lowest this value, the higher the appointment will show up the wait list. Thus, whenever you have a regular appointment cancelled, you could see if there is a wait list appointment. If there is, you could convert the wait list appointment into a regular one by clearing the ‘On Wait List’ checkbox.