It might seem basic, but with the appointment book being the beating heart of the Genie system, knowing how to make appointments quickly and accurately is key.
This article will guide you through the basic steps for creating appointments, as well as give you a few tips and tricks on how to streamline the process and add extra information for the benefit of your patients and your colleagues.
Before you begin
This article assumes that you have already configured your appointment book to suit your needs, including your appointment intervals. If you haven’t, you should check out our Appointment Preferences article for more information before proceeding.
The first step in creating an appointment is simple: Just highlight the appointment slot(s) and start typing the patient’s surname, then their first name.
You can type all or part of a patient’s full name to create the appointment. Just make sure you enter the surname first, followed by the first name, and separate the two with a space or a comma.
Tip: If the appointment needs to be longer than a single appointment slot, highlight multiple slots by clicking and dragging! The appointment’s duration will cover the highlighted slots.
When you’re typing, a small box will appear, letting you set the basic details of the appointment. The fields across the top of the window allow you to adjust the date, start and end times, as well as the duration of the appointment. You can also use the drop-down menu to the right to set the appointment type.
Pressing the Tab or Enter key once you’ve finished typing will bring up a window, which will list any patients that match what you’ve typed in.
The window that appears when you enter an appointment lets you select the patient you want to make the appointment for. Just highlight the correct patient and click the Select button. Genie will return you to the appointment book, where the appointment will appear under the patient’s name.
If you’ve only typed part of the patient’s name, you’ll probably have multiple results to choose from in this window. This allows you to search for a patient based on part of their name.
Here’s an example: You’re booking an appointment for a patient named John, but you can’t remember whether his surname was Smith or Smithe. In this case, you would just type in Smi Jo or Smi,Jo, and Genie will return a list of matching patients, like so:
We can confirm that the patient we want is John Smithe, as opposed to Joan Smith, so we simply highlight his name and click the Select button.
If neither John Smith or John Smithe appear in the list, then John doesn’t yet have a patient record in Genie. To fix this, just click the New Patient button at the bottom of the window to create a record for John.
Please note: If what you’ve typed matches absolutely no one within your Patients list, Genie will simply enter the appointment as a non-patient appointment, denoted by brown text. You can create a patient record from this appointment by highlighting it and clicking the 
icon in the appointment book:
Once an appointment has been booked, you can add extra information relevant to both the doctor and administration staff.
Appointment Type
If the appointment doesn’t yet have a type, or you need to change its type, highlight the appointment and select the appointment type from the Type drop-down menu at the top of the appointment book.
The Confirmed column*
This space lets you make a note of whether the patient has confirmed their attendance to an upcoming appointment. Just highlight the cell under the Confirmed column and type Y or N to indicate their confirmation, then press Enter. Genie will fill out the rest of the word (Y becoming Yes, and N becoming No) and will even colour-code the response for you!
Note: This column may be automatically populated with a patient’s response if you’re using Genie’s SMS reminders feature. For more information, take a look at our article on SMS reminders.
The Notes column*
This space lets you enter any extra details about the patient or their appointment. Highlight the cell under this column and start typing to add notes to the appointment.
The Invoice column*
Before invoicing, this field can be used to specify the billing items that need to be charged for this appointment. Highlight the cell under this column and type in the applicable items, separated by a + symbol. e.g. 105+30071. When an invoice is raised from an appointment in this way, the items will appear in the Item/s to Charge area, as below:
Note: This column can also be populated via the Select Items window that appears when saving a patient’s clinical record. After invoicing, this space will display a dollar amount indicating how much the patient was invoiced for.
* These columns are only visible when viewing a specific provider’s tab of the appointment book, in the Provider and Simplified views.
Comments
0 comments