Fusion Enterprise understands that the Front Office is a critical function of any practice. As such, we have ensured that you can run all of your practices front office needs through Fusion Enterprise and make it as easy as we can. This series of introductory articles will cover the important aspects of managing the Schedule with Fusion Enterprise.
The Schedule Display: The Schedule
Jump to Section [Verticle and Horizontal Views] [Background] [Time Line] [Therapist & Resource Schedules] [Example]
Verticle and Horizontal Views
A base schedule, before anything is added looks as follows
| Horizontal View | |
| Vertical View |
NOTE: You may also notice how much more compact a horizontal schedule is than a vertical schedule. Both of these images show the exact 1-week schedule from 8 am until 5 pm. The horizontal schedule accomplishes the feat in 1/4th the amount of space.
In the horizontal view, the therapist and days are down the left-hand column, and in the vertical view, the therapist and days are across the top. We will get into multiple therapists/resources later in this chapter.
Background
By default, the background is a light blue color. As of this writing, this color is not changeable. Think of it as the base background color. For each therapist and resource, you can define working hours.
Time Line
You will also notice a dashed line across the schedule highlighted by an even lighter blue. This line indicates the current time. This line will move throughout the course of the day so you can always see at a glance what the current time is on the schedule. The time indicator may be turned off in the layout.
Therapist & Resource Schedules
In the Therapist & Resource Schedules, you will define when a particular therapist or resource is available to work. We define this as a ‘Working Hour Type’. Work hour types can be classified as Working With Patients, Working Without Patients, and Not Working.
| Working With Patients | Is just that, the therapist is working and they are treating patients. |
| Working Without Patients | This indicates that a therapist is working but they are not seeing patients. |
| Not Working | Indicates that the therapist is not working. Note that by default a therapist is not working, this is only used if you want to track their ‘Not Working Hours’. This will make more sense when we get into Overrides. |
In the example below we show a therapist's schedule (with no appointment) and have defined 2 different Work Hour Types. The dark blue is a Working With Patients work hour type we called ‘Normal’ and a ‘Working With Out Patients’ type we called ‘Administration Time’.
In the above example, Chris comes in every day at 8 AM. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday Chris is off for lunch from 12:00 until 1:00. On Tuesday and Thursday, Chris has administrative time from 1:00 until 2:00 and is then off.
NOTE: We did not define a work hour type as "Not Working", we just filled in. the schedule normally.
This same schedule displayed horizontally would look like this:
Most clinics will probably have just a single working hour type defined as ‘Working With Patients’, while they may have many different types of ‘Working Without Patients’; Administrative Time, Meetings, In Clinic With Doctor, Working Local Football Game. There are lots of time when a therapist is working but not seeing patients, and with our schedule you can denote those times and report on the amount of time spent in those activities.
There are also times when you may want to denote different kinds of Working With Patient hours.
Example
Consider a clinic that has access to a swimming pool for therapy on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8 am until 10 am. We want to assign our therapist Chris to the pool on those days and want to make sure the front desk knows that that time is blocked out for Pool Therapy. If we create a working hour type called Pool Therapy classified as ‘Working With Patients’ and mark Chris’ schedule accordingly (using the Therapists & Resource Schedule Dialog) we get a schedule that looks like the one below:
In this example we made the Pool Therapy a purple color so it stands out on the schedule. It is now very easy for the person scheduling to see this different type of work hour. The reports will still show the same number of hours for ‘Working With Patients’ however now the reports can further break down hours spent in the pool vs hours spent treating patients in the clinic.
To help ease the confusion for the front desk and so they do not have to remember what all the different colors mean we have put an interactive key at the bottom of the screen. Clicking on any area of the schedule will tell you what the different colors mean.
If we click on the purple area we will see a purple box at the bottom indicating that this is ‘Pool Therapy’. As we add more detail to the schedule, such as visits, annotations, icons and symbols, the key will expand to show the meaning of all the various items.
Up until now we have just been working with a single therapist. When you have more than one therapist you have a couple of additional options.
If we add a second therapist in the vertical view you will see them show up out to the right.
This shows Chris for Monday through Friday and then Erin for the same time period. We have the ability to then select ‘View By Day’ from the right-click menu (more on the options in the menu later) and the schedule gets grouped by day as shown below:
We now see under Monday we have Chris and Erin followed by Tuesday, Wednesday etc. If we had more than 2 therapists or resources they would all be grouped under each day. To go back to the other view you would right-click and select ‘View by Therapist/Resource’
The corresponding Horizontal Views would appear as follows:
Grouped by day:
Resources work the same way as therapists. You can create work hours for them and they appear on the schedule as like a therapist. However; when scheduling a patient with a resource the patient MUST have an appointment that day with a therapist.
Resources display with a different color heading then therapists. As of the writing of this manual it was a different shade of blue as shown below:
Resources, like therapists, need working hours to display on the schedule. We have found that it can be easier to see resources if you give them a different colored working hour.
In this example Chris and Jim have one shade of blue for their working hours and the resources, Pool, Room 1, and Room 2 have a darker shade. This can make it a little easier to see therapists versus resources. Feel free to color them the way that works for you.