Appointment types can be used to change the background colour of an appointment to distinguish it at a glance from other appointments. Commonly used types include: New Patient, Follow Up, Post Op, etc.
Before you begin
If you're new to Genie's appointment book, you may benefit from our Appointment Book Overview before starting with your Appointment Types.
You can add, delete, and modify different types by selecting Modify in the Type drop-down menu at the top of the Appointment Book.
This will open the window shown here:
Use the Delete and Add Type buttons to delete or add a new type.
To edit an appointment type name, double-click on it in the list and you will be presented with a Rename prompt.
Note: Renaming an appointment type will do so for all past and future occurrences of the type.
To set the background colour for a type, select it from the list on the left-hand side and click on its name next to the word Colour. This will open a colour grid where you can select any colour you wish.
You can specify how many appointment slots a particular type uses when it is applied to a patient appointment by typing in the Number of Appt Slots box. e.g. New Patient appointments take two slots. This will not prevent users from manually adjusting these appointments to less than the minimum two slots, but it will ensure Genie defaults to two slots.
If you set up a type called exactly 'No Appointments', patients will not be able to be booked over this type.
If you create a type that starts with the word 'Antenatal', and apply it to a patient appointment, the gestation displays in the appointment cell provided the patient has a pregnancy record in their Clinical Window.
Once you have set up your types there are two ways to use them.
- To organise your patients
- To make temporary adjustments to the Appointment Schedule
1. To Organise your Patients
You can organise your patients using types to allow you to see which Patients are New, for Follow-up, etc. The Appointment Book will display the appointments using the assigned colours for the different types.
To allocate a type to a patient appointment, highlight the required appointment, and select the type from the Type drop-down menu.
This will apply this type's designated duration and change the background colour of the appointment. The duration of the appointment will only be extended if the type's default duration is longer than the appointment; it will not reduce the duration if the appointment is longer than the type.
If you highlight multiple cells and apply a type, the cells will be grouped together and the duration of the appointment will be extended to cover the highlighted cells. The appointment will only be for the duration of the cells selected even if the number of slots for this type is longer than what cells are selected.
When highlighting multiple cells that contain an appointment, the appointment will cover the duration of the highlighted cells when selecting a type.
If you would like to change the duration for this particular appointment after you've typed the appointment, right-click on the appointment, select Edit Appointment and either type the required times in the Start and End time fields or type the number of minutes in the field next the End time.
Highlighting a typed appointment and clicking on the Clear option in the drop-down menu will remove the type from that patient's appointment. However, if the appointment was spread across several appointment slots, it will keep the same duration and you must adjust this accordingly.
2. To Make Temporary Changes to the Appointment Schedule
Types can also be used to mark changes to the doctor's schedule. It is most commonly used in instances where there is a temporary interruption to the doctor's usual schedule (eg. holidays or one-off theatre sessions). For more information on setting up the Appointment Book to display the doctor's usual schedule, please see Appointment Schedules.
Example: The doctor has decided to operate on a particular Monday from 1pm to 5pm where they usually have No Appointments. Highlight the cells from 1pm to 5pm (Figure 1) and select the type you have set up from the type menu, e.g Theatre (Figure 2). This will change the colour of these cells and patients can now be booked in these time slots.
| Figure 1 | Figure 2 |
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If this temporary change needs to be repeated for a few days/weeks, please see our Repeating Appointments article for instructions on how to do this.
An Appointment Type report can be generated through Appts > Appts Type Report. This report will show how many patients of each type have been booked in a given time period and for all or a specific provider.
It can also report on non-patient appointment types by clicking on the Non-Patient Appointments tab.
