This article explains how to tailor your appointment book to your needs, as well as some of the more common issues encountered in the appointment book.

Most of these changes are made through your appointment preferences, opened through Appts > Appt Preferences or by clicking the Appointment Preferences  icon in your appointment book.

This guide won’t explain every option in your Appointment Preferences – if you would like more information on a particular field in this window, please refer to the manual.

Change Appointment Book start and end times

These times can be changed using the Start Time and End Time fields in the Main tab of your Appointment Preferences.

Keep in mind that the start and end times are universal in Genie – changing them will affect the Appointment Book for all providers in your practice. 

Change appointment slot duration

The rows or slots in your Appointment Book indicate the default length of your appointments. If you would like to change the duration of these slots, you can do this using the Interval drop down menu in the Main tab of your Appointment Preferences. This will affect all users who have Use Global Interval set as the appointment interval in their User Preferences (see User Preferences – General Tab). 

If you would like to change the interval for a single user only, leave the Interval field in Appointment Preferences as it is and modify the provider’s User Preferences instead.

Patient information in Appointment Book

If you would like the patient’s chart number, DOB, referral details, or memo to be displayed with their appointment, tick the corresponding box/es in the Main tab of your Appointment Preferences. Genie will then include this information in the Notes column of each appointment.

These changes will only apply to appointments booked from now on – existing appointments will not be updated to include the information.

Slowness in Appointment Book

If Genie feels sluggish when navigating through the Appointment Book, you may have too many appointment records in your database. When a day is selected, Genie sorts through every appointment to find those records for that day, so if there are a large number of appointments in your database, it can take Genie a while to get through them.

The best way to fix this is by setting Genie to delete old appointments. You can do this using the following fields in the Main tab of your Appointment Preferences:

We recommend using the above settings – these will delete patient appointments more than two years old, and non-patient appointments after six months. 

Note: this only deletes the appointment in your Appointment Book. Genie will never delete your consults or billing records.

Missing appointments

If your older appointments are missing, your preferences may have been set to delete patient and/or non-patient appointments sooner than you’d like.

Once appointments have been deleted, they are removed from your database - the only way to view them again would be to restore a backup. However, you can prevent this from happening again by modifying the fields shown above to reflect an appropriate number of days. Setting these fields to ‘9999’ will stop Genie from automatically deleting any appointments.

Appointment Book not refreshing

If you notice your Appointment Book is not reflecting changes made throughout the day, check the value entered in Refresh screen every X seconds in the Main tab of your Appointment Preferences. The minimum value you can set this to is thirty seconds.

Track Current Time

You can tell Genie to indicate the current time in the Appointment Book by ticking Track Current Time in the Appearance tab of your Appointment Preferences. Choose how you want this time to be shown using the corresponding drop down menu.

Incorrect Current Time shown in Appointment Book

If the current time tracker is incorrect, this usually means at least one of the computers in your practice is on the wrong time. This is commonly caused by a computer that has incorrectly switched or not switched to Daylight Savings Time.

To fix this, check the time shown on all computers in your practice, including the server. If a computer is showing the wrong time, follow the steps in our article on Daylight Saving Time to correct it. If the time is still wrong in the Appointment Book after doing this, restart every computer in the practice, including the server. 

(If the issue persists, go to File > Practice Preferences, double click on each record in turn and check the field My server is hosted in a time zone X hours ahead is set correctly for your practice.)

Change font

If the font in your Appointment Book is too small or hard to read, you can change it through the Appearance tab of your Appointment Preferences. Use the green arrow to modify the font size or manually type it into the field. You can also select a different font from the Font drop down menu. 

Make sure you note down your current settings before making any changes in case they don't work out and you need to change back.

Change appointment columns

You can choose which columns are displayed in your appointment book by clicking Modify Columns in the Appearance tab of your Appointment Preferences. Keep in mind that you will only be able to click this button if you are in the Provider view (opened using the   icon in the Appointment Book), and are not in the All tab at the top of the screen.

The Modify Columns window allows you to choose which columns to display, which columns to include when printing the appointment, and how wide each column should be.

Include/exclude empty appointment slots in Appointment Book printout

You can choose whether to include empty slots when printing your Appointment Book by ticking/unticking Don’t Print Empty Appointments in the Appearance tab of your Appointment Preferences.

Change how providers’ appointments display in your Appointment Book

If there are several providers at your practice, you may not want to see the appointments for all of them. 

To choose which providers appear in your Appointment Book, go to the Column Order and Rooms tab of your Appointment Preferences. Highlight a provider’s name on the left and click the  button above to hide them, or click the blue plus  icon and double click a provider’s name to add them. You can also click and drag names to change the order in which they are displayed in the Appointment Book.

This list is user specific, so any changes you make will only affect the Appointment Book for your user login.

Add to procedure hospital drop-down menu

The Hospital field in procedure records is populated from the Rooms list. To add to this list, go to the Column Order and Rooms tab of your Appointment Preferences and click the blue plus  button on the right.

Appointment Book looks different

If your Appointment Book looks or behaves differently to another user's, your Appointment Preferences may be different. The following are user specific:

• Appearance tab
• The blue list of providers in the Column order and Rooms tab

If you have more than one practice location, the practices in Genie may have different settings. The following fields are practice specific:

• All settings under the 'Main' tab, except for the Online Appointments section

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