MEDITECH & LSS
Appointment Scheduling
product brief

The Medical and Practice Management (MPM) Suite offers flexible scheduling options that simplify the process by which staff members at multiple and single facility health care organizations schedule patient appointments and manage resources. In addition to streamlining scheduling processes, the application helps reduce scheduling errors and missed appointments.

Standard Features

Automated Patient Scheduling
The application offers the ability to instantly find the first available time slot in which all the resources necessary to perform an appointment are available, or to utilize a "book view" to find the next available appointment. Additional features include:
• Alternative appointment times
• Control of the time window in which an appointment can take place
• Ability to schedule consecutive sessions for a patient
• Ability to schedule appointments at different sites
• Ability to accommodate both centralized and decentralized scheduling
• Flags for frequent no-shows and bad debt
• Recurring Visit feature to schedule appointments on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis
• Graphical calendars
• User-defined buffer periods between appointments
• Single, dedicated appointment book scheduling screen for physician practices.

Access to Patient Information
• Appointment-related instructions for the patient and scheduler
• Automatic retrieval of a patient's existing demographic and insurance records across the health care enterprise (even if the patient has never visited the specific location before)
• Display of the patient's appointment compliance when scheduling appointments
• Display of the patient's scheduled and pending appointments
• Display of patients outstanding health maintenance for physician practices
• User-defined access to a patient’s Electronic Ambulatory Record for physician practices
• Access to patients' outstanding billing/financial information.

Conflict Checking
Conflict checking warns a scheduler of potential conflicts at the time of scheduling, allowing conflicts to be detected and avoided. Conflicts can be based on patient's gender, age, insurance plan, or other scheduled appointments. Features include:
• Resource conflict checking
• Personnel conflict checking
• Appointment type conflict checking.

Appointment Communiques
Several features improve the communication essential for efficient patient appointment scheduling and attendance:
• Automatic appointment reminders and cancellation notices, such as letters to patients and e-mail messages to staff
• Automatic archiving of system-generated patient letters
• User-defined messages in the Appointment Conflict and Resource Appointment Conflict dictionaries
• Automatic scheduling alerts.

Resource Management
Additional features assist the management of personnel, rooms, and equipment:
• Ability to schedule patients at specialized facilities within a health care organization
• Schedules for multidisciplinary clinicians, arranged to reflect these clinicians' practice patterns; for example, a physician who works both as a general practitioner and as an orthopedic surgeon can be defined as a general practitioner on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays and as an orthopedic surgeon on Thursdays and Fridays
• Ability to determine appointment duration by appointment type and/or resource profiles
• Ability to collect the data necessary to determine the efficiency and frequency of resource use
• Ability to monitor and switch resources in an emergency
• Ability to enable managers to plan and schedule staff meetings at the most convenient times.

Waitlisting Capabilities
Waitlisting routines help departments and staff manage resources. Waitlisting provides prioritized lists of patients waiting for specific appointments. By utilizing waitlists, facilities minimize or eliminate unproductive time due to cancellations. Waitlisting allows staff to:
• Maintain and prioritize waitlisted appointment lists
• Track how long a patient remains on a waitlist
• Easily move patients from the waitlist to scheduled appointment times
• Record latest dates acceptable for patient appointments
• Efficiently manage the waitlist process.

Links With Other Applications
• User-defined links to Medical and Practice Management components
• Medical Necessity checks on associated orders allow enterprises to limit certain tests and treatments to only those patients with certain diagnoses (meeting HCFA's requirements)
• Scheduling data is shared with MEDITECH's Enterprise Medical Record allowing clinicians to view the patients they are scheduled to see
• Link with Medical and Practice Management (MPM) Suite provides a single scheduling system that ties together all facilities and coordinates scheduling across the enterprise
• Link with MPM allows automatic insurance verification and access to the patient's most up-to-date demographic information.
• Link to Authorization and Referral Management (ARM) to track visits covered for specific referrals/authorizations.

For more information, contact a MEDITECH or LSS Marketing Representative: