The Address Book is the central hub of all the contact information for all the providers and contacts your practice interacts with. For this reason, it is important to manage this space on a regular basis. You may have experienced situations before when you have wanted to send a letter or email to a certain provider, but they either haven’t been entered into your Address Book or the information in their record is old and out of date.
The purpose of this article is to ensure you have the knowledge and understanding to ensure this situation doesn’t happen, which will ultimately save you time in the future and reduce the amount of interruptions in your daily workflow!
Before you begin
Take some time to familiarise yourself with the Address Book, which can be found by going to Open > Address Book. You will be presented with a search box that looks like this:
In this window, you can search for existing people in your Address Book, by entering information into any of the search criteria seen in the above search box. If you are looking to add a new person into your Address Book, or you are required to delete/merge a person’s record you would select Cancel to this prompt.
At the top of this page, you will notice the main toolbar of the Address Book, which looks like this: 
The first icon in this toolbar is the magnifying glass 
search icon. Before adding a record, you may wish to use this to perform a search and confirm whether the person you are going to add already has an existing record. If they do not, you can proceed with adding a new record.
The second icon is the blue plus sign 
. This is the icon responsible for adding a new record into your Address Book. When you click this icon, you will be presented with a blank record as seen below:
The Details tab will be the first window you can edit, where you can enter the provider’s contact details such as their name, address, provider number, phone numbers, and email address. You also have the option of adding this person into a Category of either GP or Specialist. This is an important setting as this will determine the default referral duration for this person (either 12 or 3 months respectively) if they have a referral assigned to a patient.
You are also able to select the specific specialty of this person, if they have one, from the Specialty drop down list. If you notice that the specialty you are looking for is not currently present in the drop-down list, you can contact Genie Support on 1300 889 362, or via email at support@geniesolutions.com.au and we may be able to provide you with an execute command in order to add this specialty to your database.
It is important to try and include as much information as possible in this window, as this will save time for you in the future when you need to obtain specific information about this provider.
On the right-hand side of the Details tab of Address Book record window, you will find several tick boxes that will either activate or deactivate some important settings for this provider.
- Mark Contact is useful if you would like to mark this person’s record for grouping purposes.
- Auto Capitalise will ensure this person’s name always starts with a capital letter throughout Genie, so it’s a setting that most practices tick.
- Inactive in the top right corner will make the Address Book record inactive when ticked.
- The Assists at Operations checkbox displayed above is used to determine if this provider will be performing any assistant work, either within the practice or externally for another doctor. Ticking this checkbox will add this person to all assistant lists within Genie, and allows them to be added as an assistant on a procedure, as well as being able to be billed as an assistant on invoices. For more information about this setting and adding assistants to the system, refer to the How to Add an Assistant article.
- Much like the Assists at Operations checkbox, the Acts as Locum checkbox displayed above allows you to mark a provider as a Locum in your system. This is especially important if this person will be performing any ECLIPSE billing on their own behalf, as this checkbox will add them directly onto the list of Locums used in the event the servicing provider needs to be changed.
- Include Fax when adding CC will ensure the provider’s fax number is printed on referral (red quill) letters to other providers. It is important to note that this checkbox will not add the fax number onto merged (golden pages) letters to patients.
- The First Name and Formal radio buttons will change the salutation for this provider to appear on letters, and you will be able to see a preview of this salutation in the box below these buttons, where you will also find a preview of the Full Address for the provider.
- The Note field allows you to enter any additional notes for this provider, and just underneath this will be the Genie User checkbox to identify if this provider also uses Genie.
At the bottom of the Address Book record, you will find the 
button. When clicked, this will open the Outgoing Letters window, and will show all the letters that have been addressed to this provider.
The red quill icon 
will allow you to view and create letters to this provider that are not in relation to any particular patient.
Once you have set these details, you can click the 
button to save the new record to your Address Book.
Once you have finished setting up this provider’s Details tab, you can double click on your newly created record in the Address Book list, and move onto setting up the Correspondence tab, which will look like this:
This window is responsible for setting up the provider’s preferred method of communication and entering the relevant carrier identifiers if this person uses any third party electronic correspondence to send and/or receive letters.
The Health Provider Identifiers (Individual and Organisation) are numbers that have been assigned to the provider and the clinic they work from by Medicare, and can be found in the respective boxes to identify the provider’s details and location. If your practice is configured to use Health Identifier system, you will be able to search for these numbers for this provider by clicking the doctor icon 
directly next to the box where the number will appear.
If the provider uses third party correspondence software, you can select the carrier they are aligned with in the Preferred Method of Communication drop-down menu, and also enter any details for any of these carriers under the Carrier Identifiers section. If they do not use any third-party software, you can simply select Mail, Fax, or Email from the bottom of the drop-down menu.
Underneath this section, you will find three checkboxes:
These checkboxes are responsible for controlling the format and layout of letters that are sent and received. Include RTF in letters will send outgoing letters in RTF format, while excluding PDF content. Include PDF in letters will allow outgoing letters to be sent with PDF content.
It’s important to note that you will only be able to select one of these settings at a time, and selecting one will automatically de-select the other.
On Windows machines, you will also need to ensure there is at least one Postscript compatible printer installed on the machine responsible for sending the letters to send PDF content. On Macintosh machines, PDF generation is handled natively, so ticking the PDF checkbox is all that is required.
Can Receive CDA format will allow you to receive letters in CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) format from other practices.
Finally, if you wanted to view or create any letter templates for this provider, you can click the red quill icon at the bottom of the window to view a list of created templates.
The list will look like this to begin with:
If you have letters saved in this list, you can double click on one to open this template and view its contents. To add a new letter, click the Add button at the bottom of the window.
The envelope icon 
will enable you to print envelopes for this provider. After clicking this, you will receive the prompt below, asking you to select which information you would like to include on the envelope print out.
Once you have created a new Address Book record, you can view a list of all your records by clicking the View All 
icon. With the Address Book open, you can delete a record by simply highlighting this record on the list and clicking the trash can icon 
to delete this. Please note that you will not be able to re-add this record once it is deleted, with the exception of restoring a backup from before the deletion happened and re-creating the record.
The same thing will apply when you are merging two records into one. It is recommended when merging records together that you firstly isolate the two records that you will be merging, in order to avoid accidentally merging the wrong records together.
- This can be done by highlighting the two records you would like to merge by holding down the Shift key on your keyboard and selecting each record
- Navigate to Records Use Selected at the top of the window
- This will reduce the Address Book list to just those two records
- To merge these records together, highlight each record once again, and click the
button at the top of the window - You should now find that the records have been merged together successfully
- The record that has more information entered will usually be the record that is kept out of the two
The toolbar at the top of the page also has options for you to print 
the Address Book, print Labels 
, send out merged letter templates 
, and send a bulk SMS 
to all the providers visible on the list.
It’s important to note that if you click one of these icons, they will print/create a copy for every person visible on the list currently. This means if you have clicked the View All icon then click the Label icon, a label will be printed for every person in your Address Book, not just the person you have highlighted. If you only wanted to print for a certain few records, it is recommended that you isolate the records first by highlighting those records and going to Records Use Selected, as described when merging records above.
If you use the copy record icon 
when a provider is selected, a new record will be generated with the same information as the selected provider, except the name fields will be blank so a new name can be added to this record. This is often used when you are setting up a new record for a provider that works at the same location as an existing provider in your Address Book.
You also have the option to export the records you have selected to Outlook or Apple’s Address Book application by clicking the Export Selected Records 
icon . You will also be presented the option to export only the email addresses of these records or all the information in the records.
There are multiple ways you can search the Address Book, and all will provide you with slightly different functionality. The first is to use the method referred to previously in this article by clicking the magnifying glass icon in the top left-hand corner of Open > Address Book.
If you click the Specialty drop-down menu, you will be able to search the Address Book by specialty by selecting a specialty from the list that appears.
Additionally, the Text Search button will allow you to perform a free text search for any text anywhere in the Address Book.
You can also use the Referrers button to perform a search for all providers who currently have a referral assigned to a patient in the system. You have the flexibility to include expired referrals, and can also select to search for one particular provider or all providers.