Working with the Schedule: Adding a New Appointment

Permissions! Clinic Staff must have Administrator, Billing Manager, Billing Assistant, Front Office, Front Office Assistant, Operations Manager, PTA, Staff Therapist, Therapy Student, or Therapy Technician Permissions assigned in order to manage Schedule.

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.

You have several options when adding a new appointment in Fusion Enterprise. In this article, we will go through three different methods commonly used to add a new appointment in Fusion Enterprise.

Jump to Section [Method 1] [Method 2] [Method 3]

Method One

The primary way to add an appointment is by selecting New Appointment from the main right-click menu.

When you do this, you will be presented with the patient select dialog as covered in Chapter 26: Cross Module Features.

After the patient is selected the Appointment dialog will appear.

Add Appointment

Date	Date for which the appointment is to be scheduled. This value is initially set based on where you right-clicked on the schedule.
Time	Time the appointment is to start. This value is initially set based on where you right-clicked on the schedule.
Therapist	Dropdown with all available therapists scheduled to work at this clinic during the selected week. This value is initially set based on where you clicked on the schedule.
Appointment Type	Dropdown displaying all available appointment types.
Symbol	Allows you to set the Visit Symbol for the appointment.
Resources	Allows you to assign this visit to one or more resources and the amount of time with that resource.
Duration	Defaults to the duration of the appointment type.
Next Available	Displays a list of available appointment slots. This is most useful for clinics that treat patients one on one.
Add Block…	Allows you to add a block of repeating appointments.
Add	Adds the appointment to the schedule

If you were selective about where you right-clicked, then the Date, Time, and Therapist will all be preset; otherwise you can set them to whatever you desire.

When you have the appointment information set to your liking, you click the Add button. The appointment you just added will now show in the grid but will not yet be committed to the schedule. You can continue to add as many appointments as you wish for this patient.

Appointments that you are attempting to add will show in the Added Appointments grid. If there are any warnings the status bar on the far left will turn yellow or red. Yellow indicates that there are warnings present. In the above example, it shows that the patient is normally scheduled at a different clinic. You can delete a visit in the Add Appointments dialog by selecting it and right-clicking and selecting Delete.

TIP: In the settings, you can see the maximum number of concurrent visits and the system will warn you when you go over this number. This is set in the Global Setting page in General Information.

Appointments with a Red warning cannot be scheduled, for example, the patient already has a visit at that time. These must be deleted before you can press OK.

Once you are satisfied with the visits click OK to commit them to the schedule.

If you have added a visit and selected a resource then the visit will show under both the therapist AND the resource as shown below:

Here John is scheduled with Jim Peterson in Room 1. Notice that we have selected the visit and both visits are ‘highlighted’ (Bigger than the other visits and have a shadow under them).

It is important to note that we can change the Resource Visit independently of the Therapist Visit. It can be at a different time and have a different length.

In this example, the patient only needed the private treatment room for 30 minutes starting at 8:30 am. Note that the second half of the resource visit is gray. As a reminder, this is set in the layout under Min Visit Extent. A visit can have as many resource visits as needed. The status display of the resource visit will always mirror the therapist visit so you only need to check it in once. If you delete the Therapist visit all the resource visits will also be deleted. But deleting a resource visit will only remove that visit.

Selecting the Add Block button brings up the Add Repeating Block dialog:

With this dialog, you can select the days and the times you wish to schedule and set which resources they use and the time that they use them, and when.

In the above example, I have selected a block appointment from 9/5 through 10/5 for Mondays at 8 and Wednesdays at 9. I have also specified that the patient be in the Pool for 30 minutes starting at 8:15 on Monday and 9:15 on Wednesday.

Once I have this set and press OK, I am returned to the Add Appointment dialog with a set of new appointments.

Clicking on the Next Available button will present you with a list of available appointment slots.

Method 2

The second method of entering a new appointment is to use the Speed Schedule function from the main menu. With this method, you will only be asked to select the case from the Select Patient dialog and an appointment type. The remainder of the information is filled in based on where the right-click originated.

Method 3

The final method of entering a new appointment is to copy the visit. This method is much easier to do than it is to describe. I suggest you try it; it never hurts to add an appointment and then delete it.

When you select Copy -> Visit from the patient sub-menu your cursor will change into an Appointment block.

If you right-click while your cursor is on an appointment block you can change the duration and type of the appointment.

Every place you left-click the schedule will get this new appointment. When you are done adding new appointments, right-click and select Apply. At this time you will be presented with the Add Appointment dialog, and all of the appointments you have just added will be in the Added Grid. Pressing Apply here commits these changes to the schedule; hitting Close discards them.

If you are copying a visit and adding a resource visit it will belong to the last added therapist visit.

If you select Copy -> Copy All it will copy the Therapist Visit as well as any Resource Visit that belongs to that particular Therapist Visit.

When adding appointments you can overlap as many appointments as you need and the schedule will continue to expand to accommodate your visit load. This is where the Horizontal schedule really has an advantage over the vertical.

In the example below we have a horizontal schedule with 3 patients scheduled at 8 am and 1 patient scheduled at 8:15.

This same segment of schedule shown vertically would appear as follows:

Again, it all comes down to your preference.

TIP: In the settings, you can set the maximum number of concurrent visits and the system will warn you when you go over this number. This is set in the global settings page in General Information. So if you treat one on one exclusively you would want to set this number to 1.