TIME AND COLUMN GROUPING

Grouping Columns and Times

GROUPING COLUMNS

You may also “Group” columns together. When creating multiple appointments, TPS2000 will search for the time and specific column designated for each appointment. If you have more than 1 column in which this appointment could be placed (i.e. Dr. Greenwood has 2 columns available for general office visits and 2 additional columns for therapies), then you may group these together. In this way, when you are creating multiple appointments, the system will check each column in the group for an available time before it returns a conflict.

To create the column groups, open the “Basic System Information” or Registry screen. Use the pull down menu and find “Column Groups”. You are now ready to add your groupings.

Click on [Add a New Entry] to open an area for entry. The Group Number needs to be just that, a number. The Name/Description can be anything you wish it to be. This could, for example, also be “1”, “2” or “3” if you wish, as long as you know what these numbers designate.

Once you have created the groupings, you are now ready to use them. Close the Registry by clicking on [Exit]. Next, open the Doctor Information screen. Pull up the provider for whom you will be grouping columns.

Click on the [Schedule Columns for This Doctor] tab to bring up the correct area. You are now ready to determine which columns need to be grouped. Use the pull down arrows and select the appropriate grouping (see illustration following).

Grouping Time

You may also activate a feature that will assist with cluster booking (booking several patients for the same time period). You will use the [Edit Time Grouping] feature when you don’t want to schedule patients at precise time (e.g. 5 minute intervals), but want to schedule them so that they can come anywhere within a certain time period. In the Group Code column, designate the time grouping in which the ‘true’ appointment time falls (see following example).

You may also place a check mark in the “Don’t show NORMAL time on Schedule, ONLY show the Time Group Code. If you do this, then your scheduler will show only the Group Code. For example, If you have 3 columns for this provider and the appointment duration is set to 10 minute intervals (8:00am, 8:10am, 8:20am) a check mark in this box will display your schedule as 8AM, 8AM, 8AM.

There is another feature available if you choose to ONLY show the Time Group Code. That is the ability to delete or remove times. Let’s say that you currently have 1 ½ hour lunch break. If your appointments are set to 10 minute intervals, this means that your scheduler will have 9 lines that read “Unavailable/Break” to designate this lunch hour. You may, on this screen, go to the lunch break hours (example: 12:00PM through 1:30PM) and delete these lines (click in the small box to the left of the time grid. This will turn the box ‘black’ this designates it as removed).

CAUTION: If your office has more than one provider, you must be sure that they all have the SAME TIME designated as lunch prior to deleting these time periods.

The final step needed to run your Time Group Code is to make a minor change to the appointment scheduler. Close this area and bring up the Appointment Scheduler. In the upper right area you will see the Start/End time and the Appointment Duration. You need to set the appointment duration to “0” (zero). Then click the [Load] button to activate. If you are using custom screen views, you will need to load each custom view, and make this change, then resave the custom view to make this a permanent correction.